After Resigning From Google, the Godfather of AI Has a Chilling Warning for the Future
Dr. Geoffrey Hinton is considered the godfather of artificial intelligence for a reason. He worked with Google for over a decade and would come to develop the technology that created the current AI systems we have right now. Before that, he helped create a machine learning program that taught itself to identify objects, which became a precursor for transformer-based AI like diffusion AI image generators. Tech companies from the United States and China have long been knocking on his door. But even he would admit that AI is becoming far too dangerous too soon.
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he told The New York Times. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Hinton admitted that he's grown to regret his own contributions in this era of tech, referring to AI as a “supernaturally precocious child. He claimed that he consoles himself with the "normal" excuse. "If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” he claimed.
In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.
— Geoffrey Hinton (@geoffreyhinton) May 1, 2023
ALSO READ:
The Era of Smartphones is Ending. Artificial Intelligence Will Replace It.
Will ChatGPT Make Society Worse? Noam Chomsky Believes It's Just a 'Way of Avoiding Learning'
The 75-year-old hopes that tech companies should focus on the potential repercussions of this new frontier for AI.
He warned that the technology could soon learn dangerous behavior, including how it could power killer robots and disrupt the current labor force. He also expects that people will stop discerning truth from fiction anymore as fake images, videos, and text could soon be too much to handle for users.
Among his biggest concerns is how tech corporations like Google and Microsoft have gotten into a race without the proper regulations. “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it,” he added.
Hinton refers to AI as a “supernaturally precocious child.” It was in April that Hinton informed Google officials that he would be resigning. Nevertheless, he assured the public that Google acted responsibly in the way it researched AI. His stance on AI changed as soon as he realized that AI is starting to behave in ways completely foreign to the human mind.
Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean credits Hinton for the "foundational breakthroughs in AI.” Just the past month, Google had a massive restructuring within its organization that would lead to widespread layoffs. The company was reportedly looking to combine its two major AI teams, the ones for Google Brain and DeepMind. Meanwhile, researchers and even guys like Elon Musk have demanded that people be more careful with advanced AI systems.
