A man widely seen as the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI) has quit his job, warning of growing risks from advances in the field.
Geoffrey Hinton, 75, announced his resignation from Google in a statement to JEE News, saying he now regrets his actions.
He told JEE News that some of the risks posed by AI chatbots were “quite terrifying”.
“Right now, they’re not smarter than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they might be soon.”
Dr Hinton also accepted that his age played a role in his decision to leave the tech giant, telling JEE News: “I’m 75, so it’s time to retire.”
Dr. Hinton’s pioneering research on deep learning and neural networks has paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT.
But a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist told JEE News that chatbots could soon surpass the level of intelligence of the human brain.
“Right now, what we’re seeing is that GPT-4 eclipses the amount of general knowledge a person has and it takes them a long way. Simple reasoning.
“And given the rate of growth, we expect things to improve very quickly. So we need to worry about that.”
Dr Hinton referred to “bad actors” who would try to use AI for “bad things”.
Asked by JEE News to explain it, he replied: “It’s just kind of a worst-case scenario, a nightmare scenario.
“You could imagine, for example, that some bad actor like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decided to give robots the ability to make their own sub-targets.”
The scientist warned that this could eventually “create sub-goals like ‘I need to get more power'”.
He added: “I have come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we are developing is very different from the intelligence we have.
“We are biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same weight, the same model of the world.
“And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantaneously. So it’s like you have 10,000 people and every time one person learns something, they all know it automatically. And so these chatbots can know more than a single person.”
He stressed that he did not want to criticize Google and that the tech giant had been “very responsible”.
“I actually want to say some good things about Google. And they’re more credible if I don’t work for Google.”
In a statement, Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, said: “We are committed to a responsible approach to AI. We are learning to understand emerging threats and innovate boldly.”
