Geoffrey Hinton, a scientist regarded as the godfather of
artificial intelligence (AI), has quit his job at Google over fears of growing
dangers from innovations in the field.
Hinton announced his resignation in a statement shared with
the New York Times on Monday, saying he now regrets his work.
In 2012, Hinton and two of his graduate students at the
University of Toronto created the technology that became the intellectual
foundation for AI systems.
Commenting on recent advancements in the field, Hinton said
tech companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to
create products based on generative AI, the technology that powers popular
chatbots like ChatGPT.
“I console myself
with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have. It is
hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,”
the Times quoted the scientist as saying.
In a separate interview with the BBC on Tuesday, Hinton
described the situation as a nightmare.
“This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a
nightmare scenario. You can imagine, for example, some bad actor like [Russian
President Vladimir] Putin decided to give robots the ability to create their
own sub-goals,” he said.
“I’ve come to the
conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different
from the intelligence we have. We’re biological systems and these are digital
systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many
copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world.
“And all these copies can learn separately but share their
knowledge instantly. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one
person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these
chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”
He expressed fears that AI systems may soon become more
intelligent than humans and warned that there was a need to worry
“Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as
I can tell. But I think they soon may be,” he said.
“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.”
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