Dr Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer of artificial intelligence to the point that he was nicknamed the Godfather of AI, has quit his job at Google, with a warning issued to the world about developments in the field of AI.
Speaking to the BBC, the 75-year-old said that 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.”
He went on to say, “Right now, what we’re seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning.
“And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that.”
The Godfather of AI announced his resignation in a New York Times article, where he went on to detail some of the concerns he had about AI, including its use by “bad actors” and that AI would eventually “create sub-goals like ‘I need to get more power'”.
“You can imagine, for example, some bad actor like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decided to give robots the ability to create their own sub-goals.”
