AI companies' scaremongering: Come down again!

Another big plane trip, like to New Zealand or to Easter Island and Bora-Bora? Or would we rather let it rip in a luxury wellness oasis? It doesn't matter how much it costs or how it messes up the environment, the main thing is that we have something really glamorous and comfortable before we all bite the dust soon. Because we probably will, at least if you follow the apocalypse stories from AI bosses. Which is why they are now trumpeting the world: We have to regulate ourselves, otherwise humanity will soon be wiped out!

Yes, that actually sounds dramatic and like a science fiction script that has suddenly become real. But we should all calm down, the end of humanity is not in sight, even if the big AI companies are currently suggesting it and the ChatGPT developer OpenAI is postponing its IPO due to security concerns. And yes, AI can become autonomous; there are cases almost every day in which AI agents exceed security boundaries. AI outbreaks from supposedly isolated areas became known, for example at OpenAI and Anthropic.

And yet there is much to suggest that there is also a marketing strategy behind the AI ​​bosses' scaremongering. The attention for an IPO could hardly be greater with a doomsday scenario. And who if not the AI ​​companies themselves could regulate and even stop their own systems?

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Before an artificial intelligence destroys the world, the AI ​​companies may have destroyed themselves, namely gone bankrupt. Developing models that destroy everything not only costs a lot of money, but also huge amounts of energy - in data centers that are unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, regulation and, above all, safety measures are necessary. Because AI could actually soon hijack hospitals, power suppliers or nuclear plants and thus make the world even more unstable than it already is.