Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who’s widely referred to as ‘The godfather of AI’, has left search giants Google as he wishes to discuss the dangers of AI without being held back by firm laws.
Hinton confirmed his decision to leave Google in a recent interview with the New York Times. The computer scientist who joined Google in 2013 is known for his pioneering work in neural networks which awarded him the Turing award in 2018.
The former Google man who laid the foundations for the current advancement of generative AI is seemingly regretting his life’s work after telling NYT, “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.”
In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.
— Geoffrey Hinton (@geoffreyhinton) May 1, 2023
Hinton added that he decided to leave Google to freely discuss the negative impacts that AI could have on the world as well as ensure his warnings don’t affect the search giant itself.
The dangers of AI
Google spent $44 million to acquire a company founded by Hinton and his two students, Ilya Sutskever (currently the chief scientist at OpenAI) and Alex Krishevsky. Their neural network system was used to develop Google Bard and ChatGPT.
According to the interview, Hinton’s decision to leave was prompted by Microsoft’s Integration of ChatGPT into Bing, which the academic scientist fears could lead to uncontrollable competition among tech giants.
Hinton believes that such a competition could result in an overflow of fake photos, videos, and even texts to the extent that the average person can’t, “Tell what’s true anymore.”
Job automation fears
One of the biggest concerns regarding the global adoption of AI is misinformation. However, Hinto has also voiced concern about AI’s seemingly imminent potential to automate or even eliminate jobs around the world by being able to write and run its own code.
The more companies enhance and work on more advanced AI systems without any form of regulation, the more dangerous it becomes, Hinton believes. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
And as far as regulations go, Hinton remarked that, “Google has acted very responsibly.” And although the company’s AI isn’t available to use globally just yet, more than 25,000 industry experts and executives have signed an open letter calling for a pause in further AI advancements.
Among the signatures was that of Elon Musk, who unsurprisingly is planning to launch an AI company to compete with OpenAI.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
