Not a good sign......

Geoffrey Hinton, 'Godfather of AI,' quits Google to speak out on AI concerns

Stephen Council

Geoffrey Hinton rose to prominence as an artificial intelligence researcher. He invented groundbreaking new technologies, sold Google a 2-month-old startup for $44 million in the halcyon days of AI and received computing’s highest honor.

Now, the man known as the “Godfather of AI,” says he regrets his life’s work.

The scientist quit his job as lead researcher at Google in April, he told the New York Times in an interview published Monday, so he could speak freely about the dangers of the technology he has helped push forward for decades.

Hinton joins the chorus of scientists and researchers — many of whom are working on various forms and applications of AI — expressing concern about the tech’s escalating power and impact. 

In the short term, he’s worried about not only the propagation of fake photos, videos and texts online but also the effects of that false content on people who can’t tell they’re fake, he told the Times. He also expressed concerns about AI displacing humans in the labor market and, down the road, AI machines learning and then performing unexpected or unplanned behaviors. Hinton also concernedly suggested that autonomous weapons — a technology under active development in the United States — could enter battlefields and beyond.

“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Hinton told the Times about AI more broadly.

Hinton, whose former student Ilya Sutskever co-founded OpenAI, said he believes Microsoft and Google’s race to build up AI technology may be impossible to stop. Those firms, along with other tech titans and a litany of startups, are rushing to capture the profits of AI-enabled products — a race that OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT and partnership with Microsoft shoved into the corporate world and public eye.

The scientist tweeted after the Times article’s publication that he thinks Google has acted responsibly. The company provided SFGATE with a statement from chief scientist Jeff Dean, who said that he'll miss Hinton and that Google is "committed to a responsible approach to AI."

Hinton’s journey with Google started in 2012. He and two of his students invented a mathematical system based on neurons in the brain that could identify common objects from a batch of thousands of photos. The breakthrough paper, published that fall, revitalized the research area and altered the course of computing. Neural networks are now a core technology for self-driving cars, social media algorithms, chatbots, facial recognition software and more.

He and the students, Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, created a research startup that would quickly provoke a high-stakes auction. In December 2012, the team holed up at a computing conference in South Lake Tahoe and fielded bids from Google, Microsoft, the Chinese tech firm Baidu and the London startup DeepMind, itself later bought by Google, Wired reported.

So began Hinton’s work with the tech giant: A few months after the auction, he and his team signed on to conduct research in a $44 million deal. Hinton opened a Google AI lab in Toronto in 2017 and received the Turing Award, alongside two other AI collaborators, in 2018.