The “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton said Monday as he quit his position at Google to talk about the “dangers” of the technology he helped build.
Artificial intelligence systems, the driving force behind many of today’s products, were shaped by Hinton’s groundbreaking work on neural networks.
He spent ten years working part-time on Google’s AI development projects, but he later developed reservations about his contribution to the field and its progress.
IANS quoted Hinton from a news report in the New York Times as saying, “I console myself with the usual excuse: If I hadn’t done it, someone else would.” “I quit so I could talk about the dangers of AI and how it affects Google,” Hinton said in a tweet, adding that “Google has acted very responsibly.”
In a tweet on Monday, Hinton said he left Google to speak freely about the risks of AI rather than out of a desire to criticize Google in particular.
Hinton’s decision to step back from the company and speak out on the technology comes as a growing number of lawmakers, advocacy groups and tech insiders blame a new crop of AI-powered chatbots for spreading misinformation and displacing jobs. warned about the potential to do so, IANS added.
Late last year, the buzz around ChatGPT reignited a competition among tech businesses to build and implement comparable AI solutions into their offerings.
At the forefront of this development is OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google, IBM, Amazon, Baidu, and Tencent are also developing related technologies.