‘Godfather of A.I.’ Is Worried About Its Future
Geoffrey Hinton was 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.
On May 1, however, he officially joined critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Dr. Hinton said he quit his job at Google, where he worked for more than a decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can speak out about the risks of A.I.
A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” he said at his Toronto home.
Dr. Hinton’s journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades. Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education.
But gnawing at many insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Down the line, the critics say, it could be a risk to humanity.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said.
After the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT in March, more than 1,000 experts signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on new systems because A.I. poses “profound risks to society and humanity.”
Several days later, 19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society, released their own letter warning of the risks of A.I. That group included Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft, which has deployed OpenAI in many products, including its Bing search engine.
Dr. Hinton, often called “the Godfather of A.I.,” did not sign either of those letters and said he did not want to publicly criticize Google or other companies until he had quit his job.
Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, said in a statement: “We remain committed to a responsible approach to A.I.”
Dr. Hinton, a 75-year-old British expatriate who resigned from Google last month, is a lifelong academic whose career was driven by his personal convictions about the development and use of A.I.
In 1972, as a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Hinton embraced an idea called a neural network, a math system that learns skills by analyzing data. Few believed in the idea. But it became his life’s work.
In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, built a neural network that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects, such as flowers, dogs and cars.
Google spent $44 million to acquire a company started by Dr. Hinton and his two students. Their system led to chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard. Mr. Sutskever became chief scientist at OpenAI.
Until last year, Dr. Hinton said, Google acted as a “proper steward.” 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 technology. It is a race that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.
He worries that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”
He is also worried that A.I. will upend the job market. Chatbots could replace paralegals, personal assistants and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”
Dr. Hinton said future versions of A.I. may pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” Dr. Hinton said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
People will ‘not be able to know what is true anymore.’