Geoffrey Hinton, internationally recognized as one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence (IA), resigned from Google shortly after the launch of the Bard chatbot that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The “godfather of AI”, as Hinton is called, publicly expressed his dissatisfaction with the ethical criteria of the technological giant and pointed to the risks associated with the deployment of these technologies without adequate regulatory frameworks.
In an interview with The New York Times, the British researcher said he left Google – where he worked for more than a decade – to warn about the risks associated with the deployment of AI. “I don’t see a way to prevent malicious actors from using it to do harm,” he said.
In addition, he assured that the company relegated its previous codes to compete with ChatGPT and other similar technologies, which monopolized the technological scene in 2023.
Hinton is also recognized internationally for having received, in 2018, the Turing Award, the highest recognition in the field of computer science. This award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and considered the “Nobel of computing”. That year, he shared it with the French Yann LeCun and the Canadian Yoshua Bengio, also AI experts.
The resignation of the “godfather” of artificial intelligence
Hinton explained, as compiled by TN, that his point of view changed last year when Google, OpenAI and other companies began to launch AI systems that, in his opinion, may be superior to human intelligence. On this point, he explained that it is “terrifying” what could happen in the next five years.
The bot that OpenAI recently launched is the paradigm of a series of models that have the capacity to carry out, with certain efficiency, a series of tasks previously exclusive to human tasks. With different levels of complexity and correct answers, they can write texts, have natural conversations, compose songs, create images, solve equations, write software code and many, many other things.
To compete with ChatGPT, Google announced its own AI bot, called Bard, in January 2023. However, reports prior to Hinton’s departure suggested that other company employees had also raised concerns about the ethical criteria for a chat. responsible development of these technologies.
Even Google insiders said Bard can “cause injury and death.”
As Hinton explained, one of his immediate concerns is that the Internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and texts, and that the average person “can no longer know what is true.”
On the dizzying evolution of AI, Hinton opined: “There were very few who thought that these things could actually become smarter than people.”
“Most of us, including myself, thought that this was still a long way off. I thought there were 30 or 50 more years to go. Obviously I don’t think the same anymore,” she added.
While many experts, including many of his students and colleagues, say the threat of AI is hypothetical, Hinton believes the race between Google and Microsoft and other tech giants will become a global race that won’t stop until there is no some kind of international regulation.