Artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity, experts - including the heads of OpenAI and Google Deepmind - have warned.

Dozens have supported a statement published on the webpage of the Centre for AI Safety.

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war" it reads.

But others say the fears are overblown.

Sam Altman, chief executive of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have all supported the statement.

Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who issued an earlier warning about risks from super-intelligent AI, has also supported the call.

Yoshua Bengio, professor of computer science at the University of Montreal, also signed.

Dr Hinton, Prof Bengio and NYU Professor Yann LeCunn are often described as the "godfathers of AI" for their groundbreaking work in the field - for which they jointly won the 2018 Turing Award, which recognises outstanding contributions in computer science.

But Prof LeCunn, who also works at Meta, has said these apocalyptic warnings are overblown.