AI’s ‘godfather’ quits Google, warns of tech dangers ahead
WASHINGTON — Sounding alarms about artificial intelligence has become a popular pastime in the ChatGPT era, taken up by high-profile figures as varied as industrialist Elon Musk, intellectual Noam Chomsky and retired statesman Henry Kissinger.
But it’s the concerns of insiders in the AI research community that are attracting particular attention.
Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneering researcher who is often called the “Godfather of AI,” quit his role at Google recently so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.
Over his decadeslong career, Hinton’s pioneering work on deep learning and neural networks helped lay the foundation for much of the AI technology the world sees today.
There has been a spasm of AI introductions in recent months.
San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, rolled out its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-4, in March. Other tech giants have invested in competing tools — including Google’s “Bard.”
Some of the dangers of AI chatbots are “quite scary,” Hinton told the BBC. “Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”
In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Hinton also pointed to “bad actors” who, for example, may use AI to manipulate elections or instigate violence.
Hinton, 75, says he retired from Google so he could speak openly about the potential risks as someone who no longer works for the tech giant.
“I want to talk about AI safety issues without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he told MIT Technology Review. “As long as I’m paid by Google, I can’t do that.”
Since announcing his departure, Hinton has maintained that Google has “acted very responsibly” regarding AI.
He told MIT Technology Review that there’s also “a lot of good things about Google” that he would want to talk about — but those comments would be “much more credible if I’m not at Google anymore.”
Google confirmed that Hinton had retired from his role after 10 years overseeing the Google Research team in Toronto.
At the heart of the debate on the state of AI is whether the primary dangers are in the future or present. On one side are hypothetical scenarios of existential risk caused by computers that supersede human intelligence. On the other are concerns about automated technology that’s already getting widely deployed by businesses and governments and can cause realworld harms.
“For good or for not, what the chatbot moment has done is made AI a national conversation and an international conversation that doesn’t only include AI experts and developers,” said Alondra Nelson, who until February led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and its push to craft guidelines around the responsible use of AI tools.
“AI is no longer abstract, and we have this kind of opening, I think, to have a new conversation about what we want a democratic future and a non-exploitative future with technology to look like,” Nelson said last month.
Hinton was one of three AI pioneers who in 2019 won the Turing Award, an honor that has become known as tech industry’s version of the Nobel Prize. The other two winners, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, have also expressed concerns about the future of AI.
Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, signed a petition in late March calling for tech companies to agree to a six-month pause on developing powerful AI systems, while LeCun, a top AI scientist at Facebook parent Meta, has taken a more optimistic approach.