Bengio et al.'s proposal states that research breakthroughs are needed to solve some of today's technical challenges in creating AI with safe and ethical objectives.

Judged as of 2023-10-26. True: the Bengio et al. proposal states, in substance, that research breakthroughs are needed to solve some current technical challenges in building AI with safe and ethical objectives, e.g. language saying such challenges cannot be solved simply by scaling or with existing methods. Mostly true: the paper makes this point, but in somewhat different wording or scope, e.g. it covers safety but not ethics explicitly. Mixed: the paper calls for more safety research but does not clearly say that breakthroughs are needed. Mostly false: the paper only touches on the theme, and Marcus's 'echo' overstates it. False: the paper contains no such statement or says the opposite.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress arXiv (authors: Bengio et al.) · 15 September 2023

   “There are many open technical challenges in ensuring the safety and ethical use of generalist, autonomous AI systems. Unlike advancing AI capabilities, these challenges cannot be addressed by simply using more computing power to train bigger models.”

2. E2 Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress arXiv (authors: Bengio et al.) · 15 September 2023

   “A first set of R&D areas needs breakthroughs to enable reliably safe AI.”

3. E3 Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress arXiv (authors: Bengio et al.) · 15 September 2023

   “In some cases, leaps of progress may be needed; we thus do not know if technical work can fundamentally solve these challenges in time.”

The Bengio et al. paper says there are open technical challenges in ensuring the safety and ethical use of generalist, autonomous AI systems, and that these cannot be addressed simply by using more computing power to train bigger models (E1). It also says that a first set of R&D areas needs breakthroughs to enable reliably safe AI (E2), and that leaps of progress may be needed in some cases (E3). Together these state in substance that breakthroughs are needed for current safety and ethics challenges, which meets the 'true' criterion.