"I left so I could talk about the dangers of AI without worrying about a possible impact on Google," Hinton said. Considered one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence (AI), he warned of its dangers by leaving his position at the giant Google. Advances in this sector entail "profound risks for society and humanity," says Geoffrey Hinton, who has created a foundation dedicated to AI systems, in the American newspaper.
"Look at where we were five years ago and the current situation," he continues, judging the future prospects "frightening" by making projections on the basis of the progress of recent years. According to him, "it is difficult to see how to avoid bad actors using it for bad things".
The risk of disinformation
The rapid deployment of an increasingly "general" artificial intelligence (AI), endowed with human cognitive capabilities and therefore likely to disrupt many professions, was symbolized by OpenAI's launch in March of GPT-4, a new, more powerful version of the natural language model that operates ChatGPT.
This generative AI interface has been used by millions of people in recent months to write essays, poems or lines of computer code. This launch has also spurred competition in this area. Geoffrey Hinton also warns, in the New York Times, against the misinformation that could be generated by AI. The expert informed Google of his resignation last month, according to the newspaper.
"Knowing" if you can "control" them
In the tweet confirming his departure he refutes any desire to criticize the tech giant by this decision. "Google behaved very responsibly," he wrote. In March, billionaire Elon Musk — one of the founders of OpenAI from which he later stepped down from the board — and hundreds of global experts called for a six-month pause in research into AI more powerful than GPT-4, citing "major risks to humanity."
Geoffrey Hinton was not among the signatories, but he told the New York Times that scientists should not further ramp up these AIs "until they know if they are able to control them". In 2019, he received, with two other artificial intelligence specialists, the Turing Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel for computer scientists.
- Tech
- OpenAI
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- ChatGPT