GOOGLE — On Monday, various news outlets in the United States reported that a computer scientist who is regarded as “the godfather of artificial intelligence” had quit his employment at Google in order to warn the general public about the potential dangers posed by AI. In an interview with The New York Times, the pioneer of artificial intelligence Geoffrey Hinton expressed concern that recent discoveries posed “profound risks to society and humanity.”
Hinton expressed concern that the intense competition among internet companies was driving the reckless deployment of promising AI technology that posed a risk to jobs and spread confusion. “Take a look at how it was five years ago in comparison to how it is now,” he was quoted as saying in the piece that was published on Monday. Make the differences between them very clear to everyone. That’s a terrifying thought.
According to what he said to the Times, “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for terrible purposes.” The internet giant Google and the business OpenAI, which is responsible for the widely used artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, started building systems that were able to analyze far more information in the year 2022.
Despite the fact that AI has a long history of assisting people in the job, the introduction of ever more advanced chatbots like ChatGPT may pose a danger to human employment. According to what Hinton said to the Times, he believed that the sheer amount of data that these computers were processing had surpassed the capabilities of the human intelligence. According to what he said in the article, it’s likely that “what is going on in these systems is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain.”
The researcher was also quoted as expressing concern to the Times over the potential for AI to develop false information and propagate it. He was quoted as saying that the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.” He explained to the Times that artificial intelligence “takes away the drudge work” but that it “might take away more than that.” Jeff Dean, who is the head scientist of Google AI, sent a statement to the American press in which he expressed gratitude to Hinton.
An open letter was written in response to the publishing of GPT-4, which is a substantially more comprehensive version of the technology that is deployed by ChatGPT. The letter was signed by over a thousand people, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. Even though Hinton didn’t put his name to the original letter, he later told The New York Times that researchers shouldn’t “scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it.”
According to the Times, Hinton handed in his notice of resignation to Google a month ago. “As one of the first companies to publish AI Principles, we remain committed to a responsible approach to AI,” the corporation said in a statement about its commitment to AI. “We are continually expanding our knowledge of new dangers while also making daring technological advancements.” Since March, business magnate Elon Musk and a number of other industry professionals have been arguing in favour of putting a halt to the development of artificial intelligence systems in order to guarantee their safety.
