The Godfather fears AI, leaves Google to speak freely about it

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the “Godfathers of AI” and co-winner of the 2018 Turing Award, has recently expressed regret for his AI-related work. Hinton, who spent over a decade at Google, left the company to freely speak out about the risks of AI. His ground-breaking work led to the creation of technologies such as ChatGPT and Google Bard.

Hinton in an interview to New York Times expressed regrets for his AI-related work. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” he said adding that it is hard to see how one can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.

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Hinton resigned from Google last month and last week had a direct meeting with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Hinton’s concerns about AI are multi-faceted. He worries about the spread of misinformation, the elimination of jobs, and the possibility of AI becoming smarter than humans, potentially leading to humanity’s demise.

According to the NYT report, Hinton was happy with the way Google handled the technology until Microsoft announced its OpenAI-backed Bing AI. It sent waves of chaos and sparked intense competition at Google, thus, raising the stakes for the development of AI. However, Hinton Hinton believes that Google has been responsible with the technology so far. He even took to Twitter to express his support for same.

Despite Google’s commitment to a responsible approach to AI, Hinton is concerned that spread of misinformation could be the immediate effect of the technology and in the longer run it could eat all the human jobs.

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“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he told NYT. “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.”