AI Pioneer Develops ’Watchdog’ System to Curb Rogue Artificial Intelligence

LoiZéro. This is the name of the non-profit organization created by Montreal professor Yoshua Bengio, considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence (AI). This new organization is dedicated to responsible AI, which aims to design software capable of preventing the excesses of AI agents. "One of the first objectives is to develop a form of AI that can be used as a safeguard to ensure that AI behaves well," Yoshua Bengio described in a video published on the organization’s website.

Why responsible AI? "The most advanced systems are already showing signs of self-preservation instinct and deceptive behavior. [...] And this will only accelerate as their capabilities and autonomy increase," he explained. LoiZéro therefore intends to "propose a system of supervision of AI agents." This new generation of generative AI models will be able to perform a multitude of tasks autonomously, from Internet research to a customer call, including writing a computer program in code.

"AI can be extremely beneficial if we make sure it doesn’t harm people. [...] whether it’s because it’s in the wrong hands or autonomously," continued this winner of the Turing Prize (2018), also known as the Nobel Prize in Computer Science. He describes the current range of AI agents as "actors" seeking to imitate humans and satisfy users. According to him, the Scientist AI system would be more comparable to a "psychologist" capable of understanding and predicting bad behavior.

"We want to build AIs that will be honest and not deceptive," the researcher promised. He adds: "It is theoretically possible to imagine machines that have no self, no own goal, that are simply pure knowledge machines - like a scientist who knows a lot of things." His responsible AI is intended to be an AI with limited autonomy for scientific research. More than 15 researchers are already working within LoiZéro. Its first supporters are the AI security organization Future of Life Institute, Jaan Tallinn, founding engineer of Skype, and Schmidt Sciences, a charitable organization created by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy.