New York: Geoffrey Hinton, often called the ”Godfather of AI” on Monday, confirmed that he quit his role at Google last week to speak out about the “dangers” of the technology he helped develop.
In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.
On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than a decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.
In a BBC interview on Monday, he said, “I can now just speak freely about what I think the dangers might be. And some of them are quite scary. Right now, as far as I can tell, they’re not more intelligent than us. But I think they soon may be.”
Notably, Mr Hinton worked for Google for over a decade and was one of the most respected voices in the field.
His major AI breakthrough came when working with two graduate students in Toronto in 2012. The trio was able to successfully create an algorithm that could analyze photos and identify common elements, such as dogs and cars, according to the NYT. One of the students who worked on the project with him now works as OpenAI’s chief scientist.
His pioneering work on neural networks also shaped artificial intelligence systems, powering many of today’s products like ChatGPT, reported CNN. However, he told the BBC that chatbots could soon overtake the level of information that a human brain holds.
“Right now, what we’re seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning. And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that,” he noted.
In an interview with the Times, Mr Hinton expressed his concerns about AI’s potential to eliminate jobs and create a world where many will ”not be able to know what is true anymore.”
”It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he added. He also expressed concerns about the spread of fake imagery and text.
Mr Hinton further cited his age as a reason for his decision. “One is, I’m 75. So it’s time to retire. Another was, I actually want to say some good things about Google. And they’re more credible if I don’t work for Google,” he said.
