Geoffrey Hinton, Google AI pioneer, the father of artificial intelligence, has left Google after more than a decade of service to the internet giant.
According to a New York Times article, Hinton has joined the rising chorus of detractors who claim that businesses are rushing to market dangerous products based on generative artificial intelligence, the same technology that underpins well-known chatbots like ChatGPT.
According to the Google AI pioneer, he quit his position at Google “so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.”
He believes that as companies improve their A.I. systems, they also become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of A.I. technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forward. That’s scary.”
According to the NYT, industry insiders worry that AI is unleashing something harmful since generative AI can be used to spread false information. There are growing worries that technology would make it harder to find jobs, and tech experts say the biggest concern is that it might endanger civilization.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said.
According to the 75-year-old British, “Until last year, Google acted as a proper steward for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop.”
He said that his main worry is that there will be a deluge of fake images, videos, and text on the internet, making it impossible for the average individual to discern what is real.
He also worries that AI will upset the job market as already, chatbots like ChatGPT are now used to complement human workers, “but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. ‘It takes away the drudge work, it might take away more than that,” he said.
Geoffrey Hinton is an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future, NYT reported.
