AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton resigns from Google to voice concerns about AI

Kaan Pinar -

One of the "godfathers of AI" Geoffrey Hinton is ditching his Google VP and engineering fellow gig to candidly chat about the potential pitfalls of artificial intelligence. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Hinton didn't hold back on concerns like AI deepfakes, misinformation, and the havoc it could wreak on job markets.

Hinton's Background: Sharing the 2018 Turing Award with fellow AI bigwigs Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, Hinton's work on deep neural networks has been nothing short of revolutionary.

  • His brainchild, the backpropagation algorithm, is the backbone of most machine learning models today.
  • While juggling roles at the University of Toronto and Google, Hinton grew increasingly uneasy about AI's possible risks, including machines outsmarting humans sooner than we think.

Hinton's Concerns: Now free from his Google ties, 75-year-old Hinton opened up about his growing anxiety and some guilt about his AI contributions. He mused, "I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have."

  • Hinton's fears include AI wiping out more jobs than expected and machines with self-generated code going rogue. And let's not forget the nightmare of fully autonomous weaponry.
  • Hinton's take on AI's rapid progress? "Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary."