Google’s AI veteran and acclaimed Artificial Intelligence pioneering figure, Geoffrey Hinton, has called it quits from the company, citing the dangers of AI technology and the misinformation crisis that might arise from chatbot-like softwares. According to his recent interview with The New York Times, Hinton fears that the internet will be filled with false photos, videos, and texts, making it difficult for ordinary people to judge the trustworthiness of the content. This has already been established by the presence of fake photos of eminent people on the internet, created by artifically intelligent tools such as DallE and MidJourney.
Hinton was also not a part of prior letters written and signed by AI experts introducing the need to temporarily pause AI research. During an interview with BBC, Hinton noted, “The issue is now that we’ve discovered it works better than we expected a few years ago what do we do to mitigate the long term risks of things more intelligent than us taking control”. He further reflected on the long standing debate of AI’s capabilities versus humans, by noting “I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we are developing is very different from the intelligence we have. We’re biological systems, and these are digital systems. ”
Apart from this, Hinton also worried about AI-based applications replacing human labor. During his conversation with the New York Times, he specifically cited translators, paralegals, and personal assistants as the roles at risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence technology.
Hinton’s journey into AI was incepted during his study at the University of Edinburgh. Along with two of his students, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, Hinton started a neural network which could deduce the presence of objects such as flowers, dogs and cars just by analyzing a bunch of photos. Subsequently, Google decided to purchase the company for a reported $44 million, and the trained neural networks provided the basis for creating powerful AI tools – one of which being Bard.
It would be difficult to deny the sweeping impact, Geoffrey Hinton has had on the current state of Artificial Intelligence development. He effectively pioneered the use of image recognition and developed an impressive degree of control over modern day deep learning.
