'Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google to warn the world about the dangers of AI

As tech companies are racing towards building products based on generative AI, the chorus of people raising concerns about the danger posed by artificial intelligence technology is also growing.

Joining the growing group of generative AI critics, ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton has officially quit his job at Google where he worked for more than a decade. He has left his job to warn people about the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Geoffrey Hinton is considered as Godfather of AI as he along with his two students created technology that became the foundation of the AI system. In 2018, Hinton along with two other collaborators won a Turing award for his work on neural networks. A neural network is a mathematical system that learns skills by analysing data.

Hinton was working at Google since 2013. Google acquired a company started by Hinton and his two students for USD 44 million and their system led to the creation of more powerful technologies such as ChatGPT and Google Bard. Last year when companies started using larger amounts of data to build generative AI systems, Dr Hinnton’s views changed, as per New York Times.

As companies improve their AI system, he believes they are becoming increasingly dangerous and he regrets his life’s work.

“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Dr Hinton said in an interview with New York Times.

Industry leaders like Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates feel that the development of AI is as fundamental as the development of Microprocessors and will lead to breakthroughs in areas such as drug research and education. Other section of experts including Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk feel that generative AI can be a tool to spread misinformation, pose a risk to jobs and could lead to civilisation destruction.

Hinton fears that the AI-generated false photos, videos and text will flood the internet and an average person will not be able to differentiate between genuine and those generated by AI.

“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr Hinton said.

Until now, Hinton did not participate in any campaign against new generative AI systems as he does not want to until he had quit his job. In a tweet, Hinton said that he is quitting his job so that he could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google.

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

Hinton also spoke to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai before resigning but he did reveal many details about the conversation.