Geoffrey Hinton is the pioneer of artificial intelligence. In 2012, Geoffrey along with two of his graduate students made the technology at the University of Toronto that grew into the intellectual foundation for AI systems. The biggest companies in the tech industry believe it to be vital for their future.
Hinton said
However, on Monday, Hinton joined a growing group of critics officially. According to them, companies that are creating products based on generative AI are moving toward grave danger.
Hinton worked at Google for over a decade and was respected. However, he said a part of him regrets his most coveted life’s work. He said, “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” in an interview recently. He added, “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”
Their work
Hinton along with Alex Krishevsky and Ilya Sutskever developed a neural network. It could analyze numerous photos and train itself to identify objects like cars, flowers, and dogs. Google acquired their company for $ 44 million and went on to create increasingly powerful technologies including chatbots. Even Sutskever became the chief scientist at OpenAI. All of them received the Turing Award, which is known as ‘the Nobel Prize of computing’.
Apprehension
Although AI is complementing human workers now, Hinton fears that it could replace people like personal assistants, paralegals, translators, etc. He said, “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that.” Geoffrey added, “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Other people say
However, many of his colleagues, students, and experts think the threat to be hypothetical. He also said, “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it.”
Previously when people asked him how he could be a part of something potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase the quote by Robert Oppenheimer who helped with USA’s effort to create the atomic bomb, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.” Hinton no longer says that.
