A theoretical physicist says AI is just a ‘glorified tape recorder’ and people’s fears about it are overblown
- A theoretical physicist shut down the fears around AI saying it's just a "glorified tape recorder."
- Michio Kaku said chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT can't even distinguish true from false.
A theoretical physicist shut down the hype around the dangers of AI saying chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT are just "glorified tape recorders."
Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center, was interviewed by CNN's Fareed Zakaria about his thoughts on AI.
"It takes snippets of what's on the web created by a human, splices them together, and passes it off as if it created these things," he said. "And people are saying: 'Oh my God, it's a human, it's humanlike.'"
Kaku explained that chatbots cannot distinguish true from false: "That has to be put in by a human."
AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard are able to hold conversations and do powerful mathematical calculations, among other skills.
This has triggered concerns about the capabilities and risks associated with AI. Chatbots are usually based on large language models that are fed large amounts of information. They are also trained by humans to help improve their responses.
In March, billionaire Elon Musk and multiple AI experts signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of AI more powerful than OpenAI's GPT-4. It cited the potential risk of AI causing the loss of control of civilization.
Yann LeCun, dubbed an AI "godfather" and Meta's chief AI scientist, shared similar sentiments with Kaku saying that fears about AI posing a threat to humanity are "preposterously ridiculous."
"Will AI take over the world? No, this is a projection of human nature on machines," LeCun said at a press event in Paris in June, per BBC News.