HELPDESK
Geoffrey Hinton, a cognitive psychologist and computer scientist dubbed the godfather of artificial intelligence, told the New York Times that he resigned as Google’s vice president and engineer in April to freely warn of the risks associated with artificial intelligence. Hinton worries that Google is abandoning its cautious stance on incorporating AI into its services in an effort to compete with ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and similar AI models, opening the door to a host of ethical issues. Generative AI could also lead to a wave of misinformation in the near future, and we may no longer be able to tell what is true and what is false.
Hinton is also concerned that AI could replace some jobs. In the future, he also warns against the emergence of fully autonomous weapons or the tendency of AI models to learn strange behavior based on training data. While some of these problems are theoretical, Hinton warns of an escalation that will be impossible to control without regulation or the development of effective control mechanisms.
Hinton has dedicated his career to studying neural networks, which are key to artificial intelligence, but is best known for developing an object recognition system in 2012. His groundbreaking neural network was able to recognize common objects using training images. Google bought Hinton’s startup DNNresearch in 2013, and the basic concept of his invention helped fuel the rapid development that led to today’s generative technology. Hinton’s word in the industry therefore carries considerable weight.