Dr Geoffrey Hinton, the man widely regarded as the godfather of AI has left Google, as reported by The New York Times. As the artificial intelligence pioneer left Google, he expressed concerns about the flood of fake information, videos, and images on the internet, as well as the potential for AI to disrupt the employment market.
Hinton said that he left the search engine giant to talk openly about the dangers of AI and that he partly regrets his contribution to the area. He was hired by Google a decade ago to assist build the company's artificial intelligence technologies.
What do we know about Geoffrey Hinton?
Geoffrey Hinton is often touted as the 'Godfather of AI'. Having done his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh in 1978, he spent five years as a faculty member in the Computer Science department at Carnegie-Mellon University. He was also a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
He spent three years from 1998 until 2001 setting up the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London and then moved to the University of Toronto where he is now a distinguished professor.
According to the Google Research blog, Hinton has contributed towards designing machine learning algorithms at Google. His research group in Toronto has also made major breakthroughs in deep learning that have revolutionised speech recognition and object classification.
His research areas include algorithms and theory, machine intelligence, natural language processing and speech processing.
Hinton's resignation
As Hinton announced his resignation from Google on Monday, here are the key takeaways from his interview where he talked in depth about the reasons behind the decision and the potential harms AI can cause to the human race.
AI chatbots are 'quite scary'
In his interview to New York Times, Hinton said that he thought Google was a "proper steward" of the technology until last year. However, when Microsoft began adding a chatbot into its Bing search engine, the company became concerned about the damage to its search business.
Some of the risks of AI chatbots were "quite scary," he told the BBC, warning that they could become smarter than humans and be exploited by "bad actors." Elaborating his point, he said “I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learned something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”
Regrets his works
Hinton said that he that he partly regrets his works in the field and also that it is difficult for any of us to prevent bad actors from exploiting AI for malicious ends. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” he said in the interview.
He said that he had resigned from his position at Google to be able to talk freely about the perils of AI. Hinton tweeted saying, "Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly."
AI will put jobs at risk
Hinton said in his interview that he believed these systems were eclipsing human intelligence in some ways because of the amount of data they were analyzing. "Maybe what is going on in these systems is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain," he added.
While AI has been used to support human workers, the rapid expansion of chatbots like ChatGPT could put jobs at risk. According to Hinton, AI will "take away the drudge work" but "might take away more than that".
The scientist also warned about the potential spread of misinformation created by AI, claiming that the average person will "not be able to know what is true anymore."