Geoffrey Hinton, who won the 2018 Turing Award for his work that led to the current wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI), recently decided to quit his job at Google to openly discuss the potential threats and risks of undertaking such advanced technology. In his interview with the New York Times, the 75 year old discussed why he felt the need to talk about the risks associated with AI.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” said Hinton. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”
Google’s Chief Scientist, Jeff Dean, commented and sought to reassure the public of their responsible approach to the use and development of AI technology.
Hinton, who was employed at Google for over a decade, was part of a team that developed a neural network capable of distinguishing between different objects such as cats, dogs, and flowers. This breakthrough allowed for the further developments of Google’s AI-powered ChatGPT and Google Bard. Recently, Hinton has concerns about the scope of the technology, expressing his fear that AI could threaten traditional jobs and, eventually, even humanity itself if it were to come to the stage where AI could create and run its own code.
Microsoft’s launch of their OpenAI-infused search engine Bing had set the competitive fires ablaze within Google, reinforcing the potential risks and competition through the use of AI.
Hinton noted that while most people had issues wrapping their head around the concept of AI becoming smarter than humans, he had initially assumed it would have still have been a good number of years away.
The company mentioned in this article is Google. Google is a multinational technology company that specializes in internet-related services and products such as cloud computing, search engine, software and hardware. It has a wide array of services including Gmail, Android and Google Home. Google is widely regarded as one of the most innovative companies in the world and remains a leader in the tech industry.
The person mentioned in this article is Geoffrey Hinton. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto and a research leader at Google. He is best known for his work on neural networks and is widely credited as one of the pioneers of the artificial intelligence field. In 2018, he was awarded the Turing Award for his contribution to the development of AI. He recently chose to leave his post at Google in order to speak freely about the potential risks of AI.
