The “Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, has warned of the potential danger bad actors could pose in using the AI tools he helped create. In an interview with the MIT Technology Review, he names dropped Russian President Vladimir Putin and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as potential examples of bad actors who could use AI for malicious purposes such as winning wars or manipulating electors. Hinton believes that AI tools have the potential to be able to create their own “subgoals” and reasoning, and that those with ill intents could cause major harm. Representatives for both Putin and DeSantis did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Hinton recently left Google after a decade working with the company, citing his worries about the potential danger of AI being a major factor. In an interview with The New York Times, he shared his regrets about his initial role as a pioneer in this technology. He hopes that careful collaboration and discussion of how to control the technology will be the only solution, and expressed his belief that it may be too late to stop the tech giants in their race towards developing AI.
Elon Musk, the founder of OpenAI and other AI initiatives, released an open letter in March to call for a six-month pause on training AI systems that would be more powerful than OpenAI’s latest. This letter is not intended to call for a pause on AI development in general, but a stepping back from any potentially dangerous, unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities. Singling this out indicates an intention of caution when it comes to AI development and use.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his own concerns in a March interview with ABC News, saying that both he and the company are “a little bit scared” of what AI has the potential to do. To read more about the importance of this technology and its implications, click here to see an article from Insider.
