Nobel Prize of computing-winner Geoffrey Hinton expressed fear and regret over his work in AI.
One of the “Godfathers of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, has quit his job at Google in order to be able to speak openly about his concerns over the risks of artificial intelligence.
Hinton won the Turing Award in 2018 with two other people for work leading to today’s AI.
After having spent much of his life developing the foundational technology that has brought about the current artificial intelligence boom, Hinton has left his Google job so that he can now talk about the regrets he has over his life’s work and the risks he associates with it, according to a recent report in The Verge.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” said 75-year-old Hinton, who has worked for Google for more than ten years. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”
Hinton submitted resignation to Google as the company was releasing its artificial intelligence chatbot.
Hinton’s notification of resignation from Google occurred last month. He reportedly spoke directly to CEO Sundar Pichai, according to media reports. That said, specifics of that conversation were not revealed.
He originally joined Google when the tech giant acquired a company Hinton and two of his students had started. One of those two students continued onward to become a chief scientist at OpenAI. Hinton and those two students had created a neural network able to teach itself to identify common objects such as flowers, cats and dogs, following an analysis of thousands of images. It was this work that laid the foundation for the development of ChatGPT and Google Bard.
In an interview with the New York Times, Hinton was reportedly satisfied with the way Google was handling artificial intelligence technology until Microsoft announced that it was launching Bing with OpenAI integration. This challenged the heart of Google’s business and caused the company to launch an urgent response with its own AI.
Hinton cautioned that this aggressive competition might be unstoppable, filling the world with a glut of fake images and text, to the point that nobody will know “what’s true anymore.”
