GODFATHER OF Al NOW WARNING

THE WORLD ABOUT HIS 'CHILD'

sions, mixed with the an:...1ty

W
hen he was a com- io;' he told the BBC.
puter science pro- "Right now, they're not
fessor at the Uni- more intelligent than us, as
versity of Toronto, far as I can tell. But I think
Geoffrey Hinton revolu- they soon may be," he said.
tionized the way machines "What we're seeing is
interact with people and things like GPT-4 eclipses a
the world. His work was so
innovative, he was scooped
up by Google and dubbed
the "Godfather of Artificial LOOKATHOW
Intelligence."
As AI explodes into the
Geoffrey Hinton ITWASFIVE
public realm with leaping "It is hard to see how you
enhancements, however can prevent the bad actors YEARS AGO
he is now frightened by hi~ from using it for bad things." AND HOW
child. .The immediate danger, he
I He has quit his job at said, was Al's ability to cre- IT IS NOW.
Google, he said, "so that I a~e convincing false photos,
could talk about the dangers VI~eos and audio - showing
of AI." thmgs that didn't happen or
Hinton's remarkable shift weren't done by the people person in the amount of gen-
from leading AI proponent seen or heard in the generat- eral knowledge it has and it
to AI klaxon pushes con- ed content. eclipses them by a long way.
cerns over the rapid pace Most people, he said will In terms of reasoning, it's not
of its development from "not be able to know what is as good, but it does already
the confines of the scientif- true anymore." do simple reasoning."
ic community and chronic He said AI can also de- His simple explanations
doomsayers. stroy job sectors by replacing in interviews show why he
Hinton, 75, is starting human workers. Then, he was a good university pro-
to regret his life's work ac- warns, could come some- fessor. He spells out an ad-
cording to a feature in'ter- thing even more frightening. vantage machines have over
view in The New York With AI systems consum- humans when it comes to
Times. ing so much data and reach- learning.
"I console myself with the ing some unexpected conclu- "I've come to the conclu-
normal excuse: If I hadn't sion that the kind of intel-
done it, somebody else ligence we're developing is
would have," Hinton told re- very different from the intel-
porter Cade Metz from Hin- ligence we have," he said to
ton's Toronto home. the BBC.
"Look at how it was five "We're biological systems
years ago and how it is now:" and these are digital sys-
Hinton is quoted sayin~ tems. And the big difference
about the pace of develop- is that with digital systems,
ment of AI "Thke the differ- you have many copies of
ence and propagate it for- the same set of weights, the
wards. That's scary." same model of the world.
Right now it is not so And all these copies can
much the machines, but the learn separately but share
people using them. their knowledge instantly.
 "So it's as if you had
10,000 people and when-
ever one person learnt
something, everybody auto-
matically knew it. And that's
how these chatbots can He was named a Compan-
know so much more than ion of the Order of Canada in
any one person." 2018 for being "the driving
Hinton, born in Britain, force behind the develop-
came to canada in 1987 after ment of a new form of artifi-
holding teaching positions cial intelligence:'
in the United States, to work His pioneering and in-
as a computer science pro- fluential work in AI was
fessor at the University of honoured in 2019 when he
Toronto, and later became a won the A.M. Turing Award,
Canadian citizen. dubbed the Nobel Prize of
His research here was computing, alongside two
transformational. His Toron- collaborators, Yann LeCun,
to research group made ma- of Facebook and New York
jor breakthroughs in deep University, and Yoshua
learning that revolutionized Bengio, of Universite de
speech recognition and ob- Montreal.
ject classification. Hinton complained on
The ideas and research on 'l\vitter that the piece in The
deep neural networks emer- New York Times made it
ging from the startup com- seem he was attacking his
pany he created with two of former employer, Google.
his graduate students was so "Cade Metz implies that
exciting Google didn't just I left Google so that I could
recruit bim, they bought the criticize Google. Actually, I
whole company in 2012 for left so that I could talk about
$44 million. the dangers of AI without
Hinton then divided his considering how this im-
time between the university pacts Google. Google has act-
and Google, and in 2016 he ed very responsibly," he said
was named a Google vice in a tweet.
president and engineering N ational Post
fellow running Google's arti-

i
ficial intelligence lab in To-
ronto. He retired from teach-
ing at the university and re-
tained a professor emeritus
status.