Geoffrey Hinton, a scientist widely regarded as the founder of artificial intelligence (AI), has left Google out of concern about the rising risks posed by new developments in the field.
Hinton announced his retirement on Monday and expressed his regret for his work in a statement provided to the New York Times.
The technology that served as the theoretical basis for AI systems was developed by Hinton and two of his doctoral students at the University of Toronto in 2012.
In his analysis of recent developments in the field, Hinton claimed that internet companies are rushing headlong into peril with their aggressive drive to develop goods based on generative AI, the technology that powers well-known 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.
Hinton referred to the circumstance as a nightmare in a separate interview with the BBC on Tuesday (2 May 2023).
He said, “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.”
“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 voiced concerns that AI systems would soon surpass human intelligence and said there was reason to be concerned.
“Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be,” he said.
“And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that.”
