June 1, 2023: Artificial intelligence may lead to mortal death, and lowering the risks associated with the technology should be a global priority, industry experts and tech leaders said in an open letter.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement Tuesday read.

Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, and executives from Google’s A.I. arm DeepMind and Microsoft were among those who supported and signed the short statement from the Center for A.I. Safety.

The technology has gathered pace in recent months after chatbot ChatGPT was released for public use in November and subsequently went viral. In just two months after its launch, it reached 100 million users. ChatGPT has amazed researchers and the general public with its ability to generate humanlike responses to users’ prompts, suggesting A.I. could replace jobs and imitate humans.

Tuesday’s statement said there has been increasing discussion about a “broad spectrum of important and urgent risks from A.I.”

But it said it could be “difficult to voice concerns about some of advanced A.I.’s most severe risks” and aimed to overcome this obstacle and open up the discussions.

ChatGPT has sparked awareness and adoption of A.I. as significant firms worldwide have raced to develop rival products and capabilities.

Altman had admitted in March that he is a “little bit scared” of A.I. as he worries that authoritarian governments would develop the technology. Other tech leaders such as Tesla’s Elon Musk and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have cautioned about A.I.’s risks to society.

In an open letter in March, Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and several tech leaders urged A.I. labs to stop training systems from being more potent than GPT-4, which is OpenAI’s latest large language model. They also called for a six-month pause on such advanced development.

“Contemporary A.I. systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,” said the letter.