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‘Godfather of AI’ leaves Google, warns danger of the new tech

Eliza Sayon May 4, 2023

2 min read

Computer scientist Dr Geoffrey Hinton has left Google last week and is now speaking out about the potential risks that may develop alongside the advancement of AI.

Dr Hinton, who pioneered neural networks that later on shaped the artificial intelligence systems of many technologies today, tweeted on Monday that he left the tech giant to talk about the dangers of AI without considering how it will impact Google.

Check out: McAfee report finds cybercriminals can steal voices through AI

In his interview with the New York Times, Dr Hinton expressed his concerns that the sudden race to further develop AI technologies such as Bing and Google might create false online content that might be impossible to discern by the human eye.

He also warns that AI technologies will in time upend the job market, leaving many unemployed, and that future AI technologies could learn and develop unexpected behavior from the data they collect and analyse.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he told the New York Times.

“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.”

He also believes that the race to advance AI will severely escalate and will not stop without some sort of global regulation.

Check out: Google calls to relax copyright law for AI info mining

Dr Hinton’s concerns about AI coincides with a rising number of concerns among lawmakers, advocacy groups, and tech insiders on the possibility of new AI-powered chatbots causing job displacement and spreading misinformation.

After the release of ChatGPT in March, over 1,000 tech leaders and researchers signed an open letter that called for a six-month moratorium on the development of new systems. The open letter highlighted the ‘profound’ risks A.I. technologies pose to society and humanity.

Leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence then released their own letter warning of the risks of A.I. In their letter, they stated that AI systems could make errors, provide biased recommendations, threaten our privacy, empower bad actors with new tools, and to have an impact on jobs.

The Association then called on the AI research community to expand their efforts on AI safety and reliability, ethics, and societal influences in order to harness AI for the betterment of all humanity.

Dr Hinton is one of the few former Google employees that have warned about the dangers of AI. A Google engineer was fired in July after claiming that an unreleased AI system had become sentient. However, many in the AI community strongly disputed the engineer’s claim.

Eliza Sayon

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Eliza is a content producer and editor at Public Spectrum. She is an experienced writer on topics related to the government and to the public, as well as stories that uplift and improve the community.