Soares expressed urgent concern about the future of AI for the same reason Schmidt found the technology to be too difficult to govern: because frontier AI models tend to act in ways their makers didn’t explicitly design or even anticipate.
Schmidt argued that the benefits of AI will ultimately outweigh the risks, disagreeing with arguments made by Sweeney, Soares, and other academics onstage.
“The companies that are doing this work are well aware of the dangers, and I know this because I work with them on this, and we spend an awful lot of time talking about them,” Schmidt said. “We can talk about some of them, but that is not to take away from the enormous benefit of these technologies.”
Schmidt, deGrasse, Sweeney, and Soares were joined onstage by Kate Crawford, a professor of AI at the University of Southern California, Chris Callison-Burch, a University of Pennsylvania computer science professor, and Cindy Rush, a statistician who teaches at Columbia University.
