Geoffrey Hinton , 75, considered the " godfather of artificial intelligence ", has left his role at Google to be able to speak freely about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) .
“I left so I could talk about its dangers,” he said in a tweet after the New York Times broke the news yesterday. “Google acted very responsibly,” adds the computer scientist.
Hinton's pioneering work in neural networks shaped the AI systems that power many of today's products. “Right now, they're not smarter than us, as far as I know. But I think they may soon be,” Hinton explained.
Hinton worked at Google for a decade developing the tech giant's AI, but he has begun to have serious concerns about both the technology and his role in advancing it.
"I console myself with the usual excuse: if I hadn't done it, someone else would have done it," Hinton told the New York Times.
The British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist told the BBC that the chatbot could soon surpass the information level of a human brain.
“Right now, what we're seeing is things like GPT-4 overshadow a person in the amount of general knowledge they have and overshadow them by far. In terms of reasoning, it's not that good, but it already makes simple reasoning. And given the pace of progress, we expect things to improve quite quickly. So we have to worry about it,” he explained to the BBC.
(Unioneonline/vl)
