Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather of AI”, has quit Google with a warning about the dangers the technology poses. He told The New York Times that he regrets the work he contributed to the field. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.” He further added, “AI is quite scary. Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”
Dr Hinton’s pioneering research on neural networks and deep learning has paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT. In artificial intelligence, neural networks are systems that are similar to the human brain in the way they learn and process information. They enable AIs to learn from experience, as a person would. This is called deep learning.
One of his main concerns is that he fears the technology will cause confusion and chaos to people “not be able to know what is true anymore” because of the proliferation of fake images, videos and text. “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he says. “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.”
He warned that regulation is required to ensure that companies such as Google and Microsoft do not get locked into a dangerous race. Those companies might already be working on dangerous systems in secret, he suggested. “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it,” he said. (AJDB)
