Why 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton is worried, what are the dangers he has warned of

Hinton expressed regret regarding his life's work in the field of AI, and said that he had quit his job to speak freely about the dangers of AI.

As artificial intelligence steps out of sci-fi and makes its way deeper into our lives, one of its pioneers, Geoffrey Hinton, has left his job at tech giant Google, warning of danger ahead.

Hinton, 75, expressed regret about his life's work and said he quit his job to speak freely about the dangers of AI. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton told the New York Times in an interview.

As the interview made waves across the world, the tech pioneer also tweeted that he left Google to talk about the dangers of AI and not to criticise the tech company.

In the NYT today, 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. Google has acted very responsibly.

— Geoffrey Hinton (@geoffreyhinton) May 1, 2023

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Warning of the potential dangers of AI, Hinton said in the NYT interview, “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things”.

The tech pioneer said he feels that as companies improve their AI systems, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of AI technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary,” Hinton said.

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The Turing Award winner spoke to the BBC as well and said that he concluded that the kind of intelligence AI is developing is very different from the kind of intelligence humans have.

"We are biological systems and these are digital systems, with digital systems you have many copies of the same model of the world and all these copies can learn separately but share that knowledge instantaneously and that's how these chat apps can know so much more than any one person," Hinton told the BBC.

Hinton also called the chatbots "quite scary". He said while current chatbots were not at par with humans when it came to intelligence but that could change soon. "Right now, they're not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be," he told BBC.

Speaking about his decision to quit his job at Google, Hinton said that his age had played into his decision to leave the tech giant.

"I'm 75, so it's time to retire."A British expatriate to Canada, Hinton spent most of his academic life researching AI. In 1972, as a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, Hinton started working on an idea called a neural network. A neural network is a mathematical system that learns skills by analysing data.

In 2012, Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, created one such neural network which could analyse thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects such as flowers, dogs and cars.

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Google spent $44 million to acquire a company started by Hinton and his two students and their neural network led to the creation of chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Bard.