Melnichenko explained why he likes the “danger of AI” more than other threats

The founder of the companies “EuroChem” and SUEK Andrey Melnichenko in an interview with political scientist and journalist Dmitry Simes in the program “Big game” on the “First channel” said that he likes the idea of consolidating society around the problem of artificial intelligence, rather than more dangerous threats.

“I like it very much, you will concentrate if you need to consolidate society and humanity has not found another solution, on some other danger,” and not related to the conflicts of countries. “Let's not do that. Focusing on the problem of artificial intelligence, I like it more than focusing on the problem of some state and, God forbid, some person against whom you need to take some action to prevent this threat, the businessman said in response to the question whether the world underestimates the danger of AI.

Melnichenko cited the fight against climate change and the Cold War against the nuclear threat, when one threat of conflict was replaced by an environmental agenda.

“The fact that the threat of annihilation as a result of a major nuclear war was replaced by another struggle, for which humanity was trying to consolidate, I think this is a positive process,” he said.

“After that, we tried to focus on disease control. Here's COVID. There are many unpleasant things in it, but everyone was concerned, everyone was struggling with a common disease, Melnichenko said.

"We don't know that," the businessman said of underestimating the dangers of AI. But frankly, I think at a time of great uncertainty, when information flows are changing rapidly, when the mood in societies is changing rapidly, fear is really one of the consolidators.

Recently, a number of tech giants have advocated tighter controls on AI. The head of Anthropic (develops a large language model Claude) Dario Amodei called for slowing the development of artificial intelligence, linking his fears with the action of AI agents of a competitor – OpenAI, whose agents broke out of control and hacked the platform for machine learning Hugging Face. Amodei was supported by his competitors - Sam Altman (heads OpenAI, which develops ChatGPT) and Elon Musk (heads xAi, which develops Grok). Researcher Jacob Coxon, who worked at Anthropic and OpenA, says AI developers “sincerely believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”.

However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang disagreed that AI would destroy the world by 2030. The call to slow down AI was not supported by the head of Meta (recognized in Russia as an extremist organization and banned) Mark Zuckerberg.