In the first episode of a new, five-part series of Tech Tonic, FT journalists Madhumita Murgia and John Thornhill ask how close we are to building human-level artificial intelligence and whether ‘superintelligent’ AI poses an existential risk to humanity. John and Madhu speak to Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer of generative AI, who is concerned, and to his colleague Yann LeCun, now head of AI at Meta, who isn’t. Plus, they hear from Eliezer Yudkowsky, research lead at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, who’s been sounding the alarm about superintelligent AI for more than two decades.

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Tech Tonic is presented by Madhumita Murgia and John Thornhill. Senior producer is Edwin Lane and the producer is Josh Gabert-Doyon. Executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco. Original music by Metaphor Music. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

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FT Tech Tonic