Geoffrey Hinton, who is also known as the ‘Godfather of AI’, left his role at Google last week to speak out about the “dangers” of the technology he helped develop.
Hinton, the AI pioneer whose work on neural networks helped lay the foundation for the AI systems used by tech giants, has quit his Google job where he worked for over a decade so he can openly raise concerns about generative AI, which powers popular chatbots such as ChatGPT.
Citing the rapid evolution of AI technology, he said: “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now … Take the difference and propagate it forward. That’s scary.” He is worried that the AI race will flood the Internet with false information such as photos, videos, and text, making it difficult for people to distinguish what is true and what is not.
He warns that these companies are moving too fast and creating products that pose risks. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said. While many experts dispute this threat, Dr. Hinton says that regulating AI is challenging which is why this technology should not be scaled up more until experts know they can control it.
In a tweet, Hinton said he left Google so he could speak freely about the risks of AI, rather than to criticize Google specifically.
Dr. Hinton, a VP and engineering fellow at Google, said he regrets his life’s work and that he left Google so that he could speak out freely about the dangers of AI. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Dr. Hinton told New York Times during an interview at his home in Toronto. He used to paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it,” to justify working on potentially dangerous technology, but his views on AI have since changed.
Who is Geoffrey Hinton?
Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a 75-year-old British-Canadian computer scientist, world-renowned for his work with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Hinton received his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh in 1978. He then became a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and moved to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he is now an emeritus professor.
Hinton is best known for his contributions to neural network research, a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. His research group in Toronto made major breakthroughs in deep learning that have revolutionized speech recognition and object classification. He has received several honorary doctorates and awards including the 2018 Turing Award often called “the Nobel Prize of computing” for his neural network work.
Hinton, Google and the $44 million secret auction
In 2012, Hinton and two of his students at the University of Toronto, Alex Krishevsky and Ilya Sutskever, built a neural network, a mathematical system modeled on the web of neurons in the brain, that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects with incredible accuracy. This system is how self-driving cars recognize objects such as cars, pedestrians, and traffic signals, using sensors and vast amounts of data it is trained on.
In 2013, Google reportedly spent $44 million in a secret auction to acquire Hinton’s company for its research on deep neural networks, also called “deep learning” for computers as the research involves helping machines understand the context. Hinton chose Google over Microsoft and Chinese tech giant Baidu which also joined the bidding. This system set off a race for AI supremacy, resulting in the creation of ever-more powerful technologies, among which are advanced chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Bard.
Rapid AI development causes concerns among experts
Hinton is not the only one concerned about the harm posed by AI. After the release of a new version of ChatGPT in March, more than 1,000 tech leaders, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, signed an open letter urging a six-month moratorium on advanced AI development due to the “profound risks to society and humanity” posed by AI technologies. Other signatories include entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Rachel Bronson, and AI professor Yoshua Bengio. The letter now has over 27,000 signatures.
The letter said: “Powerful A.I. systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” Later, another 19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence also released their own letter warning of the risks of AI.
