Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt opposes US government-led push for smarter-than-human AI: ‘The Manhattan Project assumes…’

Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, along with Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, and Center for AI Safety Director Dan Hendrycks, has cautioned against a government initiative to develop artificial intelligence systems with superhuman capabilities, known as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The trio called it “Manhattan Project” in their policy paper and said that this may provoke severe retaliation from China potentially including cyberattacks that might destabilise international relations.

“[A] Manhattan Project [for AGI] assumes that rivals will acquiesce to an enduring imbalance or omnicide rather than move to prevent it,” the authors write in their paper “Superintelligence Strategy.”