Renowned AI pioneer, Geoffrey Hinton, recently stepped down from his post at Google due to increasing concerns about the potential risks arising from advancements in the field of AI such as popular chatbots like ChatGPT. In a recent interview with BBC News, the 75-year-old ‘Godfather of AI’ shared his regrets and worries about the progress in AI, citing some of the consequences as being “quite scary.”
Hinton noted the amount of general knowledge that far surpasses that of a single human found within AI chatbots like GPT-4, and pointed to the possibility of the chatbot’s reasoning going beyond that of the humans if left unchecked. This possibility of AI having an advantage in terms of information processing and events unfolding led to Hinton alluding to a “nightmare scenario” where an individual with malicious intent could provide AI with the capability of creating its own goals in a quest for more power.
Despite his own fears, Geoffrey Hinton is still upbeat and optimistic about the potential contribution of AI, but acknowledges that there is a need for growing safety measures against its potential risks. His concerns have been echoed by Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, the two other AI pioneers who won the 2018 Turing Award for deep learning research, who have both called for a pause in steps towards creating an artificial general intelligence (AGI) until sufficient safety measures are in place. Jeff Dean, Google’s Chief Scientist, has expressed Google’s commitment to taking a responsible and thoughtful approach to advancing AI.
Google has also taken steps to ensure the safe growth of AI. They have implemented policies to regulate how AI is developed and used and to ensure the safety and security of their products. They have also invested in research and development in order to create more sophisticated AI tools that can help manage and prevent potential harms, such as the kind mentioned by Hinton.
Geoffrey Hinton is a renowned British computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, who has made fundamental contributions to deep learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence. He is one of the AI field’s thought leaders and has advised companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple. He has also founded or co-founded several companies, including Google Brain, a software engineering firm focused on machine learning applications. He has received numerous awards, including the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and the Turing Award, which is widely considered to be the Nobel Prize of the computing world.
