A top Meta scientist’s claims AI won’t wipe out humanity are dangerous, says his former co-researcher

• AI godfather Yoshua Bengio says the risks of AI should not be underplayed. 
• In an interview with Insider, Bengio criticized peers dismissing AI’s threat to humanity.
• His remarks come after Meta’s Yann LeCun accused Bengio and AI founders of “fear-mongering.”

Claims by Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, that AI won’t wipe out humanity are dangerous and wrong according to one of his fellow AI godfathers.

“Yann and others are making claims that this is not a problem, but he doesn’t know — nobody knows,” Yoshua Bengio, the Canadian computer scientist and deep learning pioneer, told Insider Thursday. “I think it’s dangerous to make these claims without any strong evidence that it can’t happen.”