‘Godfather of AI’ leaves Google to warn of risks of tech arms race
Christopher Hutton
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One of the leading artificial intelligence engineers dubbed the “godfather of AI” has left a top role at Google to criticize the field of AI.
Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the pioneers of AI, announced on Monday that he had quit his job as an engineer at Google and was joining a growing number of experts who have spoken out about the dangers that the quickly accelerating technological innovation presents to society. Such warnings have become more prevalent since the introduction of AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and image generators such as Midjourney.
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“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” Hinton told the New York Times. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
In 2012, Hinton and two of his graduate students in Toronto built a neural network that analyzed thousands of images to teach itself how to identify everyday objects. The technology was acquired by Google for $44 million and acted as the foundation for developing ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award for his work on neural networks.
Hinton said he changed his mind on the tech in the last year as Google and OpenAI began to use larger data models. Hinton was critical of this approach because it meant the large language models powering the bots quickly moved past the human brain’s capabilities in specific capacities. “Maybe what is going on in these systems is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain,” he said.
Hinton warned that the internet could see a surge of false images and text to the point that the average person would “not be able to know what is true anymore.”
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” 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.”
This race toward increased intelligence could accelerate in the near term now that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are racing to develop the most competent AI yet. This race has drawn out several industry experts as critics. More than 1,000 tech industry leaders, including Elon Musk and Andrew Yang, signed a letter in March calling for a six-month pause on the training of AI.
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OpenAI has acknowledged the risks associated with the technology. “We’ve got to be careful here,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview. “I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this.” Altman said the company is attempting to ensure the bot is safe so it doesn’t present false information.
Other countries have responded to the accelerating technological capabilities by demanding that the data used to train it be selectively controlled. Chinese regulators filed a draft of guidelines requiring that any chatbots developed in China hold to socialist ideologies.