Geoffrey Hinton, a Google engineer widely considered the godfather of artificial intelligence, has quit his job and is now warning of the dangers of further AI development.
Hinton worked at Google for more than a decade and is responsible for a 2012 tech breakthrough that serves as the foundation of current AIs like ChatGPT. He announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, saying he now regrets his work.
"I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have," he told the paper.
"It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," Hinton went on to say of AI.
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Hinton's major AI breakthrough came when working with two graduate students in Toronto in 2012. The trio was able to successfully create an algorithm that could analyze photos and identify common elements, such as dogs and cars, according to NYT.
The algorithm was a rudimentary beginning to what current AIs like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard AI are capable of. Google purchased the company Hinton started around the algorithm for $44 million shortly after the breakthrough.
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One of the graduate students who worked on the project with Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, now works as OpenAI's chief scientist.
Hinton warned that the progression seen since 2012 is astonishing, but it is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
"Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now," he said of the industry. "Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary."
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Hinton's fears echo those expressed by over 1,000 tech leaders earlier this year in a public letter calling for a brief halt to AI development. Hinton did not sign the letter at the time, and he now explains that he did not want to criticize Google while he was with the company. Hinton has since ended his employment there and had a phone call with Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday.
"We remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly," Google's chief scientist, Jeff Dean, told the Times.
