AI Poses Danger To Mankind, Founder Says As He Quits Google

A scientist regarded as the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI), Geoffrey Hinton, has quit his job at Google, stating that his innovation poses danger to mankind.

Speaking on Tuesday, Hilton, who created the technology in 2021 alongside two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto, described the situation as a nightmare.

“This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a nightmare scenario. You can imagine, for example, some bad actor like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decided to give robots the ability to create their own sub-goals.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have. We’re biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world.

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“And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”

He expressed fears that AI systems may soon become more intelligent than humans and warned that there was a need to worry

“Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be,” he said.

“Right now, what we’re seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning.

“And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that.”