AI pioneer launches research group to help build safer agents

Bengio will lead a team of more than 15 researchers who are initially working to build a new technical solution called Scientist AI that’s meant to act as a guardrail for AI agents. — Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Yoshua Bengio, an artificial intelligence pioneer, is creating a new nonprofit research organisation to promote an alternative approach to developing cutting-edge AI systems, with the aim of mitigating the technology’s potential risks.

The nonprofit, called LawZero, is set to launch June 3 with US$30mil (RM127.45mil) in backing from one of former Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt’s philanthropic organisations and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, among others.