After working for more than a decade with Google INC, Geoffrey Hinton, the pioneer of Artificial Intelligence (AI), has quitted working with the tech company.
It was learnt through a report by The Punch credited to The New York Times that Hinton has joined a growing army of critics who say companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
According to Hinton, who is considered the AI godfather, he quit his position at Google “so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.”
He believes that as companies improve their A.I. systems, they also become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of A.I. technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forward. That’s scary.”
Industry insiders, according to NYT, are afraid that AI is releasing something dangerous, noting that generative AI can be a tool for misinformation. Concerns have grown that it could be a risk to getting jobs and according to tech experts, the biggest worry is that it could be a risk to humanity.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said.
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According to the 75-year-old British, “Until last year, Google acted as a proper steward for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop.”
He stated that his immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will not be able to know what is true anymore.
He also worries that AI will upset the job market as already, chatbots like ChatGPT are now used to complement human workers, “but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. ‘It takes away the drudge work, it might take away more than that,” he said.
Geoffrey Hinton is an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future, NYT reported.
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