Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, along with Vice Chairman Charlie Munger, recently spoke out against Artificial Intelligence at an annual meeting, where Buffett made dire comparisons to the atom bomb.
"It can do all kinds of things and when something can do all kinds of things I get a little bit worried," Buffett said in a report by Yahoo! "I know we won't be able to uninvent it and, you know, we did invent—for very, very good reason—the atom bomb."
Buffett had previously called bitcoin "rat poison." Buffett and Munger recently held an annual gathering in Omaha, Nebraska, where they spoke about their company's operations. Vice Chairs Greg Abel and Ajit Jain were also attendees at the meeting. Buffett and Munger talked about geopolitics, finance and investments of the future. Buffett was very candid about his worry about the evolution of AI tools, saying that it could cause more harm than good to humanity. The report said this will be especially true if society relies on it more as time goes on.
Munger said he was skeptical of some of the hype surrounding AI, noting that he thinks "old-fashioned intelligence works pretty well."
Business and technology experts have expressed concern about the risks associated with fast and unsupervised training of AI models. The Yahoo! Report said the godfather of AI, the co-founder of Apple and the previous leader of the AI alignment team at OpenAI have all urged caution as interest in artificial intelligence (AI) among investors and the media increases daily.
At the annual meeting, the two also talked about Berkshire Hathaway's activities, saying that their investment portfolio had increased by 13% over the previous year. They both denounced Bitcoin and reiterated their belief in the strength of the American economy. Munger also advocated for improving friendship relations with China. Munger said that increasing tension between the U.S. and China is "stupid."
"There's one thing we should do: let's get along with China, and we should have a lot of free trade with China in our mutual interest," Munger said.
