Superintelligent Agents Pose Catastrophic Risks — Can Scientist AI Offer a Safer Path? | Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture

Yoshua Bengio discusses risks arising when general-purpose AI agents autonomously pursue goals, including misuse, deception and loss of human control. He presents Scientist AI as a proposed non-agentic alternative combining a model that explains observations with question-answering inference. Explicit uncertainty is central to its design, with potential applications in scientific research and assessing other AI systems.