Geoffrey Hinton, who is considered the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI), has left Google and warned of the growing dangers posed by the development of the field, writes the BBC.
In announcing his departure from tech giant Google, Hinton said he now regrets what he did. He told the BBC that AI-driven chatbots have become quite scary and, while not currently more intelligent than humans, could soon become so. The scientist’s research on deep learning and neural networks paved the way for currently used AI technologies such as chatbots.
A cognitive psychology expert and computer scientist told the BBC that chatbots could soon surpass the ability of the human brain to learn. “Right now, what we’re seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning. And given the rate of progress,
we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that,”
said Hinton.
In an article published in the New York Times, Hinton suggests that bad actors could use AI for nefarious purposes. Asked to elaborate on the idea, the scientist told the BBC that the worst-case scenario could come true if evil people like Putin ordered robots to set their own subgoals.
This means that over time the robots might decide that one of their goals is to gain more power.
Hinton noted that he has come to the conclusion that the intelligence of AI is fundamentally different from the intelligence of biological organisms: “And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world. And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. 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.”
Hinton emphasized that he did not want to criticize Google and said that the tech giant has been very responsible and that there are many good things to say about Google.
Jeff Dean, Google’s lead researcher, said the company remains committed to treating AI responsibly.
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