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In brief: Geoffrey Hinton, one of the three legendary computer scientists who have become known as the Godfathers of AI, is once again warning that the rapidly developing and lightly regulated AI industry poses a threat to humanity. Hinton said people don’t understand what is coming, and that there is a 10 to 20 percent chance of AI eventually taking control away from humans.
Speaking during an interview earlier this month that was aired on CBS Saturday morning, Hinton, who jointly won the Nobel Prize in physics last year, issued a warning about the direction that AI development is heading.
“The best way to understand it emotionally is we are like somebody who has this really cute tiger cub,” Hinton said. “Unless you can be very sure that it’s not gonna want to kill you when it’s grown up, you should worry.”
“People haven’t got it yet, people haven’t understood what’s coming,” he warned.
It was Hinton’s ideas that created the technical foundations that make large-scale models such as ChatGPT possible, including the first practical way to train deep stacks of artificial neurons end-to-end.
Despite his contributions to the technology, Hinton has long warned of what could happen if AI development continues at speed and without safeguards. He left Google in 2023 so that he could talk about the dangers of AI without impacting the company he worked for. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” Hinton said of AI’s state of being at the time. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary,” he added.
The professor has also repeated concerns that AI could cause an extinction-level event, especially as the technology increasingly finds its way into military weapons and vehicles. Hinton said the risk is that tech companies eschew safety in favor of beating competitors to market and reaching tech milestones.
‘I’m in the unfortunate position of happening to agree with Elon Musk on this, which is that there’s a 10 to 20 percent chance that these things will take over, but that’s just a wild guess,’ Hinton said.
While he spends more time fighting AI in the courts these days and promoting his own Grok chatbot, Musk used to often talk about the existential threat posed by AI.
Hinton reiterated his concerns about AI companies prioritizing profits over safety. “If you look at what the big companies are doing right now, they’re lobbying to get less AI regulation. There’s hardly any regulation as it is, but they want less,” he said.
Hinton believes that companies should dedicate much more of their available compute power, about a third, to safety research, rather than the tiny fraction that is currently allocated.
Hinton is also particularly disappointed in Google for going back on its word to never allow its AI to be used for military applications. The company, which no longer uses the “Don’t be evil” motto, made changes to its AI policy earlier this year, opening the door for its tech’s use in military weapons.
The AI godfather isn’t anti-AI, of course; like Bill Gates, he believes the technology could transform education, medicine, science, and potentially solve climate change.
Professor Yann LeCun, another of the three godfathers of AI, is less worried about speedy AI development. He said in 2023 that the alleged threat to humanity is “preposterously ridiculous.”
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