Godfather of AI quits Google, warns about technology’s danger

Geoffrey Hinton, known as the ‘Godfather’ of artificial intelligence (AI) has announced his resignation from Google and warns about the technology’s danger to humanity.

Hinton made this announcement during an interview with New York Times on Monday, where he talked about his decision to leave Google, saying he now regretted his work.

Since the 1970s, Hinton currently 75 years old, has been fascinated by neural networks, a mathematical system that can learn skills by analyzing data,

In 2012, Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, created a neural network. Their work formed the foundation for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and other AI chatbots that learn from analyzing massive amounts of digital text, then reform that knowledge on command into natural language.

Read also: MTN registers 1.2m active MoMo wallets in three months

During his interview, he said that some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”.

“Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”

“I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have. We’re biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world.

“And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person,” he said in a separate interview with BBC on Tuesday.

Hinton isn’t the first Google employee to raise a red flag on AI. In 2022, the company fired an engineer who claimed an unreleased AI system had become sentient, saying he violated employment and data security policies.