There’s a fun little irony in Anthony Albanese’s big speech on artificial intelligence landing in the very same week that one of the industry’s elder statesmen argued something slightly more dramatic.
Writing on his Substack, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis made the case that artificial general intelligence is only a few years away, and that it represents something more than a typical tech leap. (Think electricity or fire rather than Uber or Airbnb.)
He also suggested the pace of progress is outstripping our ability to manage it safely. Hassabis proposed a US-led standards body, modelled on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, that would test and certify frontier AI releases and be empowered to impose industry-wide slowdowns if things got out of hand.
He isn’t alone in making such radical proposals. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last month called for something tougher still: an aviation-style regulator with the statutory power to unilaterally block unsafe AI.
