Geoffrey Hinton, famously known as the “Godfather of AI,” has quit his job at Google so that he can freely talk about the risks of AI. The 75-year-old scientist expressed that a part of him regrets some of his contributions to the field.
Hinton is a cognitive psychologist and computer scientist who’s most renowned for building a neural network back in 2012, along with two of his students. He later joined Google in 2013, continuing his research on artificial neural networks.
After 10 years at Google, Hinton quit his job, citing concern over the spread of misinformation. He’s also afraid that AI may adversely affect the job market and pose a risk to humanity if AI starts writing and implementing its own code. Hinton stated that he started worrying about the effects of AI as generative technology started getting more and more powerful in the past year alone. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forward. That’s scary,” he said. Hinton said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learned something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” said Hinton in an interview with the New York Times. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he added.
