Geoffrey Hinton, ‘The Godfather of AI’, Resigns from Google to Signal AI Risks

“The Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, has resigned from Google so that he can “freely speak out about the risks of AI,” he said in a statement to the New York Times.

The 75 year old announced his resignation at a time where AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard are rapidly growing in popularity. As an engineering fellow at Google for over a decade, Geoffrey helped lay the groundwork for what we know generative AI to be today.

According to the New York Times, Hinton says that a part of him regrets his life’s work now that he sees the risks that generative AI presents. Hinton worries that AI will not only spread misinformation to the point that the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore,” but that it will also disrupt the job market in a negative way.

Hinton’s prior belief was that the AI revolution was still decades away. However, with the launch of ChatGPT and the large language model’s intelligence as it is right now, he’s backtracked on that theory.

“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” Hinton says. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”

In response to ChatGPT and Bing, which are both powered by GPT-4, Google rushed to launch Bard. This caused major concerns internally at Google, as many felt Bard was not tested, accurate and safe enough to be launched.

After the article in the New York Times was released, Hinton did clarify that his remarks were not a criticism of Google. In fact, he states he believes the company “acted very responsibly”. He is instead concerned about the risks that could arise due to how quickly AI is being developed as a result of the competitive landscape. Hinton is concerned that companies could lose control if regulations aren’t put into place.

Hinton states, “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it.”

Story via Mashable