Employees leaving tech companies is not exactly news. There’s been a rash of layoffs recently at all the big Silicon Valley household names, but one person, who’s departing Google on his own, is kind of a big deal.
His name is Geoffrey Hinton, and he’s a Google engineer who many consider to be the “godfather of artificial intelligence.” That’s a pretty ambitious title, but he was there for over ten years and was on the team responsible for what’s considered the foundation of current AIs.
Well, he’s quit his job — so he can devote his time to warning people about the impending dangers of AI, as it appears, there is no stopping it from getting into the hands of really bad actors. So to review, he was one of the guys who helped usher in this new technology, and he wished he hadn’t.
Here’s what he told the New York Times.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have. It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”
Make no mistake, Hinton feels AI is dangerous. What he and two graduate students did in 2012 was successfully create an algorithm that could analyze photos and identify common elements. It served as the basic framework for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google swept in and bought the company Hinton worked for.
His concern is similar to the fear Elon Music and the 1,000+ tech leaders who signed that public letter calling for a halt to AI development.
If you think AI has come a long way in the past 11 years, Hinton thinks you aint seen nothing yet.
“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
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