Geoffrey Hinton, a prominent figure in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), has resigned from his job at Google and expressed concerns about the potential dangers of AI.
Hinton, who is considered the godfather of AI, stated in a New York Times statement that he regrets his work in the field. He told the BBC that some of the dangers posed by AI chatbots are “quite scary.”
Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.
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.
He expressed concerns about the potential of AI chatbots to exceed human knowledge and warned of the risks of “bad actors” using AI for malicious purposes. His groundbreaking work on deep learning and neural networks has paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT.
When asked about his concerns about the potential of AI chatbots, Dr Hinton referred to it as a worst-case scenario and a nightmare.
You can imagine, for example, some bad actor like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decided to give robots the ability to create their own sub-goals.
Dr Hinton cautioned that this could lead to the creation of sub-goals, such as the need for more power. He also noted that the intelligence created by AI is very different from human intelligence, as digital systems can have many copies of the same model of the world, which is not the case for biological systems like humans. He said:
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 learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.
Dr Hinton emphasised that he did not intend to criticise Google and praised the company for being responsible. He also stated that his positive comments about Google are more credible as he no longer works for the company.
In a statement, Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean stated that the company is committed to a responsible approach to AI, continuously learning about emerging risks while also innovating boldly.