Las Vegas recently hosted the Ai4 conference at the Venetian, and three trailblazers in artificial intelligence took part in the keynote speech.

Among them was Geoffrey Hinton, who's widely regarded as the Godfather of AI.

In the 1980s, inspired by the structure of the brain, he created an early computer model that helped lay the foundation for modern AI.

And in 2024 he even won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work but now considers AI a potential threat to society.

At the conference, he said this about AI agents, which are systems that can take a goal, make a plan to accomplish it, and then take action and readjust in order to achieve it.

-What's happening is these things are getting smarter.

And once you have AI agents, you give them goals.

And to achieve goals, they have to create subgoals.

Like if you want to get to Europe, you have to get to an airport.

Now, one subgoal that we've seen them generate is self-preservation.

So obviously, if an AI agent has some things it's trying to achieve and it's smart, it realizes that if it ceases to exist, it won't achieve those things.

So I think as they get smarter, we're going to see more and more complex intentions they have and more and more ability to escape control.

And so I don't believe we're going to be able to keep control of them in the simple way of just we outthink them so they can't escape.

They're going to be able to outthink us, and so my belief is we have to figure out how to make them benevolent.

We have to figure out how to make them care about us more than they care about themselves.

-Hinton's argument raises questions about who should regulate AI and to what extent.

But complicating that conversation is that some AI experts disagree about how serious and immediate the risks are.

Joining Hinton for the conference keynote were Andrew Ng, a pioneer in AI and online education; and Fei-Fei Li, a pioneer in AI research, who's widely recognized as the Godmother of AI.

Each offered different views on the fear surrounding the technology and what it could mean for jobs.

(Fei-Fei Li) On one side, the extreme rhetoric is the doomerism and really the fear mongering rhetoric.

On the other hand, I also think that the total utopian talk is not helpful either, because every tool is a double-edged sword.

AI is such a powerful tool.

It will, if not wielded in the right way, bring harms.

-Someone who works in a call center, that's a job that's not safe.

AI can do a better job; maybe not today, but very soon AI will be able to do a better job than the people who work in call centers.

It will actually know the answer to your question.

Now ask, what are those people going to do?

They typically don't have a high level of education.

Any job you could retrain them for, AI will be able to do.

(Andrew Ng) One of the things I worry about is the recent AI "job apocalypse" scenario, which paints a picture that AI is so powerful it will wipe out 50% of all jobs and maybe they're rewriting industries and so on.

The reality I see on the ground is, of all the disciplines that AI is entering is affecting software engineering the most because AI is amazing at writing code.

And it turns out that software engineering job postings are up, and we can't find enough skilled software engineers.

Yes, there is a lot of hype in the media about AI layoffs where businesses are saying, Because of AI, I'm laying off a lot of people.

But the reality is, speaking with a CEO of a large workforce complete recently, they said that he ran a survey of people that were actually recently laid off.

And what percentage do you think actually were replaced by AI?

Not 50%, not 20%, not 10%, but 1.4%.