Team Blitz India
NEW DELHI: The pioneer of artificial intelligence (AI) bowed out of work early this month to voice his criticism of the technology publicly. Geoffrey Hinton (75) – known as the Godfather of AI – quit his job of over a decade at Google. In an interview to The New York Times (NYT), he said that he partly regretted his life’s work.
He had warned about misinformation flooding the public sphere and AI replacing more employees than predicted. “You might not be able to know what is true anymore,” he said. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton told the NYT. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he added.
He later said in a tweet, “In the NYT today (May 1), Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Goo gle has acted very responsibly.”
In 2012, Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto had created the technology that would lay the intellectual foundation for AI. Popular chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are based on the technology.
AI today stands at a very critical moment with its graph shooting upwards. Many believe that the technology could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education. The NYT report implies that Hinton is concerned that Google is not going to continue its restraint on AI releases so it could compete with ChatGPT.
