“I console myself with the usual excuse: If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have,” said Hinton, who has been working for Google for more than a decade. “It’s hard to see how you can prevent bad actors from using them for bad things.”
Hinton informed Google of his resignation last month, and on Thursday spoke with CEO Sundar Pichai directly, according to a report. The New York Times. Details of that discussion were not disclosed.
It is this work that eventually led to the creation of ChatGPT and Google Bard.
The lifelong academic joined Google after it acquired a company started by Hinton and two of his students, one of whom became OpenAI’s chief scientist. Hinton and his students developed a neural network that taught itself to recognize common objects like dogs, cats, and flowers after analyzing thousands of images. It is this work that eventually led to the creation of ChatGPT and Google Bard.
According to the The New York Times In the interview, Hinton was pleased with Google overseeing the technology until Microsoft released its new Bing software that contained OpenAI, challenging Google’s core business and sparking a “code red” response within the search giant. Such fierce competition may be impossible to stop, Hinton says, resulting in a world with so many fake images and text that no one can say “what’s true anymore.”
Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean softened the blow with the following statement: “We remain committed to a responsible approach to artificial intelligence. We are constantly learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”
The spread of misinformation is Hinton’s only immediate concern. On a longer timeline, he worries that AI will scrap jobs by heart, and perhaps humanity itself when AI starts writing and running its own code.
Hinton told The New York Times. But most people thought it was too far fetched. And I thought it was unattainable. I thought it was 30 to 50 years old or even longer. Obviously, I don’t think so anymore.”