Scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who is widely known as %TheGodfatherOfAI has left his senior position at Google in order to warn people about the dangers posed by %ArtificialIntelligence.
Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist who received his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence 45 years ago, had been dividing his time between Google and The University of Toronto.
However, he has now quit his role at Google ($GOOG) so that he can warn the world about the potential dangers posed by A.I.
In an interview with The New York Times newspaper, Hinton said that A.I. is developing at a much faster rate than he envisioned and poses serious threats to society.
Hinton was named a 2018 Turing Award winner for his conceptual and engineering breakthroughs in A.I. But he told The Times that he now regrets much of his life’s work.
Specifically, Hinton said he sees risks of A.I. taking human jobs, and the proliferation of fake photos and videos that appear real to unsuspecting people.
In a statement released after The New York Times interview, Hinton said “I now think the digital intelligences we are creating are very different from biological intelligences.”
Hinton began warning about the potential harm of A.I. before leaving %Google, saying earlier this year in media interviews that the technology is moving too quickly for humans to adapt.
Asked by CBS News during a March 2023 interview whether he thinks A.I. could wipe out humanity, he responded “It’s not inconceivable.”
Hinton, age 75, had been working within Google’s Brain Research division. His most recent role at the company was Vice President and Engineering Fellow.
Google several years ago bought an A.I. company started by Hinton for $44 million U.S., bringing him into the company in the process.
Hinton had made major breakthroughs in deep learning that accelerated speech recognition and object classification in A.I. models.
That work helped to pave the way for large language models that have led to the creation of chatbots such as %ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
According to The New York Times article, Hinton quit his job at Google so he can now speak about the risks of A.I.
Hinton told the newspaper, “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.”