LONDON: Geoffrey Hinton, who is considered the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI), has quit tech giant Google, warning about the growing risks from developments in the field.
Hinton, 75, announced his resignation in a statement to the New York Times, stating that he now regretted his work.
He told the BBC that some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”. Right now, as far as I can tell, they’re not more intelligent than us, but they may soon be.”
Current AI systems like ChatGPT are the result of Dr Hinton’s groundbreaking work in the fields of deep learning and neural networks.
The British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist told the BBC that the chatbot may soon surpass the knowledge a human brain can store.
“Right now, we’re seeing things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in terms of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them a long way. In terms of reasoning, it is not as good, but it is already doing simple reasoning.”
“We anticipate things to improve (in the field of AI) quickly, given the rate of improvement. In light of it, we should be scared.”
In his New York Times article, Dr Hinton referred to “bad actors” who would try to use AI for “bad things”.
When asked to elaborate on this, he told the BBC: “Simply said, this is a nightmare situation or sort of the worst-case scenario. Imagine, for instance, that a nasty guy like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin chose to provide robots with the freedom to define their own sub-goals.”
The scientist expressed concern that this may eventually lead to “sub-goals like ‘I need to get more power’.
He said: “I have come to the firm conclusion that the type of intelligence we’re cultivating differs greatly from the intelligence we already possess. These are digital systems, whereas we are biological systems. The main distinction is that digital systems duplicate the same set of weights and world model several times.”
“And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So, it is as if you had 10,000 people, and everybody automatically knew it whenever one person learnt something. And that is how these chatbots can know so much more than a single person.”
He, however, said that he did not want to criticise or blame Google and that the tech giant had been “very responsible”.
Meanwhile, Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean said in a staement: “We remain committed to a responsible approach to artificial intelligence. We arere continually learning to understand emerging dangers while also innovating boldly.”
