Geoffrey Hinton, aged 75, announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, saying he now regretted his work.
He told the BBC* 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.”
Dr Hinton’s pioneering research on deep learning and neural networks has paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT.
But the British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist told the BBC the chatbot could soon overtake the level of information that a human brain holds.
“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.”
AI is growing like a snowball running down-hill and taking up speed just as such. The time is now and only now to set the boundaries to avoid potential future harm. Although we are a little way off computers attacking the human race, bad actors are already taking advantage of the power of this technology to aid them in their attacks. The same technology is currently being used as the antidote in powerful threats but truth be told, the future of AI is relatively unknown which can be worrying in the direction that it could go.
We have spent many years investing in AI but this wonderful achievement will inevitably be used nefariously and could form part of larger scale attacks, especially if used in nation state attacks. These dangers are not imminent but we need to learn from mistakes made about our relatively slow reaction to cybercrime and prepare for the misuse of this prevailing computing power. We should never underestimate the risks and therefore aim at making controlled AI protection in stark contrast to the unavoidable uncontrollable future.
*ESET does not bear any responsibility for the accuracy of this information.
ESET Ireland 