One of the pioneers of the AI industry, Geoffrey Hinton, has left Google and warned the world about potential risks associated with the technology. The New York Times.
He says the threat will arrive sooner than expected.
“I thought it would be in 30-50 years or maybe even longer. Clearly, I no longer think so,” the scientist said.
Hinton said he regrets the work of his entire life. He mentioned short-term risks to the job market, as well as the spread of fake photographs, videos and texts.
“Now I think the digital intelligence we are building is very different from biological,” the scientist said in remarks to CNBC.
Hinton cited the power of the GPT-4 language model and the ChatGPT chatbot, which has gone viral since its launch at the end of last year.
“If I have 1000 identical digital agents with the same weight, every time one agent learns something, they all immediately learn of it because of the same weight,” said Hinton.
In his view, biological agents cannot do this.
“Thus, a set of identical digital agents can acquire far more capabilities. That is why GPT-4 knows far more than any human,” concluded the scientist.
According to Hinton, he left Google to speak freely about the dangers of AI.
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
“I left to talk about the dangers of AI, not thinking about how it affects Google. Google has acted very responsibly,” he wrote.
Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI”, earned a PhD in AI 45 years ago. He remains one of the most respected figures in the field.
For the past decade, Hinton has worked for the tech giant part-time. In 2022, he was appointed vice president and senior fellow at Google Brain.
The head of the division, Jeff Dean, expressed regret at Hinton’s departure.
“I will miss him, and I wish him all the best,” he said.
In April, Google merged Brain and DeepMind into one team.
In July 2022, the tech giant fired engineer Blake Lemoine, who had detected a “mind” in the LaMDA language model.
In July 2021, Sami Benjio, co-founder of Google’s AI division, resigned.