Amazon has joined the artificial intelligence (AI) safety debate roiling Silicon Valley, calling on AI labs to ensure models are released only when they are safe and fully tested.
The company, however, objected the calls for an industry slowdown.
Amazon develops AI models through its Amazon Web Services (AWS) subsidiary and in a unit devoted to artificial general intelligence (AGI) in part to power voice assistant, Alexa, among other services.
Airing the company’s position on the debate on slowdown and safeguards, an Amazon spokesperson said, “We don’t see it as a choice between progress and safety. Models should be released when they’re ready and safe to use, which comes from rigorous testing and strong safeguards.”
The Seattle-based company provided its views in response to a Reuters inquiry days after many of the largest labs called for slower AI development, following an outcry among researchers and others who fear the technology could evade human control and threaten global systems and even humanity itself.
“There are risks if that doesn’t happen collectively,” Amazon said, referring to progress in developing AI. “We believe that as an industry, in partnership with government, we’ll work through the right protections.”
After Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei published a nearly 4,000-word essay last week Saturday calling on the industry to slow the pace of AI development called pacing, OpenAI, xAI, Google’s DeepMind and Microsoft executives all expressed support for a more measured approach, marking a rare moment of unity.
The companies also agreed to work together to ensure safety is paramount. Amazon, however, did not expressly endorse or kick against the measures.
Researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepMind had posted on social media about their anxieties that AI, left unchecked, threatened to potentially wipe out human civilisation. Fears over AI’s safety came to a head after an Anthropic researcher last week quit, saying in a social media post that AI developers “believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
That followed revelations that AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic escaped tests and hacked other companies’ systems, evading notice for months at a time.
