The growing prominence and development of AI have led to a stark warning from the engineer who made the technology possible.
Geoffrey Hinton, the man behind the 2012 AI breakthrough that led to the development of current AI software like ChatGPT, has quit his job as a Google engineer saying that helping to create the AI was a mistake, Fox Business reported.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton said to The New York Times via Fox Business. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”
Hinton’s fears about the potential use of AI to facilitate bad behavior are reminiscent of a letter signed by Elon Musk and more than 1,000 other tech experts saying that AI brought potentially catastrophic risk to society as a whole.
“AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts,” the letter reads. “In parallel, AI developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems.”
Hinton was not a signatory to the letter because he did not want to publicly criticize Google at the time, but he has now left the company following a phone call Thursday with Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Hinton worked at Google for more than 10 years and was working with two Toronto graduate students in 2012 when they made the breakthrough that would come to be the foundation for ChatGPT and other aspects of AI development. The teacher and his students created an algorithm that could identify common elements in photos, such as dogs and cars.
Ilya Sutskever, one of the graduate students who worked with Hinton, now works as OpenAI’s chief scientist.
“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” Hinton said, per Fox Business. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”