The distinguished AI researcher often called the “Godfather of AI” quit his job at Google – and says he now partially regrets his work developing the burgeoning technology on account of the hazards it poses to society.
Dr. Geoffrey Hinton is a renowned computer scientist who is widely credited with laying the foundations of artificial intelligence that eventually led to popular chatbots corresponding to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other advanced systems.
said the 75-12 months-old Recent York Times that he left Google so he could speak openly in regards to the dangers of the rampant growth of AI – including the spread of misinformation, job shocks, and other more nefarious possibilities.
“I take comfort in the conventional excuse: if I hadn’t done it, another person would have,” Hinton said in an interview published on Monday.
“Look the way it was five years ago and the way it is now,” Hinton later added in an interview. “Take the difference and propagate it further. It’s terrible.”
Hinton fears that AI will change into much more dangerous in the longer term, with “bad actors” potentially using advanced systems “for bad things” that will probably be difficult to stop.
Based on the report, Hinton informed Google of his plans to step down last month and spoke in person last Thursday with the corporate’s CEO Sundar Pichai. The IT specialist didn’t reveal what he had discussed with Pichai in the course of the telephone conversation.
Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean defended the corporate’s efforts in artificial intelligence.
“We remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We proceed to learn to grasp emerging threats while boldly innovating,” Dean said in a press release.
The Post contacted Google for further comments.
Hinton is the most recent in a growing body of experts to warn that AI could do significant damage without proper oversight and regulation. In March, Elon Musk and greater than 1,000 other distinguished figures within the AI sector called for a six-month hiatus in advanced AI development, citing potential “serious threats to society and humanity.”
In an interview, Hinton expressed concern that artificial intelligence has already begun to overtake the human mind in some elements.
He also mentioned concerns that the pace of AI development will pick up as Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Google and other tech giants race for leadership in the sector – with potentially dangerous consequences.
Hinton fears that advanced AI could eventually spiral out of control as systems gain the flexibility to create and run their very own computer code – and even power weapons without human control.
“The concept that this thing could change into smarter than humans – a couple of people believed in it,” Hinton added. “But most individuals thought it was distant. And I assumed it was distant. I assumed it was a matter of 30 to 50 years and even longer. In fact, I do not think that anymore.”
In a recent interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Pichai himself warned that AI would lead to job losses for “knowledge employees” corresponding to writers, accountants, architects and software engineers.
Pichai also described bizarre scenarios where Google AI programs developed “recent properties” – or learned unexpected skills they weren’t trained to do.
Since 2013, Hinton has split his time between professorships on the University of Toronto and Google engineering. He has been working for the tech giant since Google acquired the startup he founded with two students, Alex Krishevski and Ilya Sutskever.
The trio developed a neural network that learned to discover common objects, corresponding to cars or animals, by analyzing hundreds of photos. Sutskever is currently the lead scientist for OpenAI.
In 2018, Hinton was a co-recipient of the Turing Award – sometimes called the world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize – for his work on neural networks, which has been described as “great discoveries in the sector of artificial intelligence“.
Hinton’s long bio on Google’s website praises his achievements – noting that he “made a breakthrough in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification.”