AI 'Godfather' Geoffrey Hinton 'Regrets' His Work, But Says 'Somebody Else Would Have' Done It If He Hadn't

Hinton has left Google and voiced his concerns about the developments in the field. The 75-year-old AI pioneer raised his concerns while talking to NYT and BBC.

Hinton said he has quit his job at Google so he can freely speak out about the risks of AI.

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Geoffrey Hinton, popularly known as the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI), has warned about the growing dangers of rapid developments in the field as he quit his job at Google, reported BBC. Hinton announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, adding that he 'regretted' his work but maintained that 'someone else would have' done it if he had not. 

The 75-year-old AI pioneer created the technology with two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto in 2012, which became the intellectual foundation for AI systems, said a New York Times report. This marked a development that the big tech companies believe is the future, with AI-driven tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney already in existence. 

However, on Monday, Hinton joined the voices of critics who are wary of the rapid research and developments in the fields. In an interview with the BBC, he said that AI chatbots were "quite scary". 

"Right now, they're not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be," he added. However, the British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist told the BBC the chatbot could soon overtake the level of information that a human brain holds. 

"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 was quoted as saying by the BBC. 

As per a New York Times article, Hinton spoke of the dangers around AI saying, "It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things." 

When asked by the BBC to elaborate on this, he replied: "This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a nightmare scenario."

"You can imagine, for example, some bad actor like Putin decided to give robots the ability to create their own sub-goals," he told BBC. He warned that this eventually might "create sub-goals like 'I need to get more power'." 

He added: "I've come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we're developing is very different from the intelligence we have." 

"We're biological systems and these are digital systems. 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 learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that's how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person," Hinton explained. 

Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for over a decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of AI, stated a New York Times article. The report quoted Hinton as saying that a part of him now regrets his life’s work. 

"I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have," Dr. Hinton said, as quoted by the New York Times.