BUSINESS INSIDER
After recently leaving behind his decade-long career at Google, Geoffrey Hinton, nicknamed “the Godfather of AI,” told The New York Times he has regrets around the foundational role he played in developing the technology.
- Geoffrey Hinton quit his job at Google and told The New York Times he regrets his role in pioneering AI.
- Hinton said he’s worried the technology will disseminate false information and eliminate jobs.
- Hinton said he quit so he could warn about the risks of AI without worrying about the impact to Google.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have. It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Hinton, who worked at Google for more than a decade, told the Times.
Hinton’s departure from the company arrives at a time when the race to develop generative AI-powered products, like Google’s Bard chatbot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is heating up. Hinton, whose developments in the AI field decades ago helped pave the way for the creation of these chatbots, told the Times he’s now concerned the tech could harm humanity.
He also voiced concern around the AI race currently underway among tech giants and questioned whether it was too far along to pump the brakes on.
On Monday, following the publication of his interview with The New York Times, Hinton tweeted that he left Google so he could “talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google,” adding that “Google has acted very responsibly.”
“Geoff has made foundational breakthroughs in AI, and we appreciate his decade of contributions at Google,” Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google, said in a statement to Insider.
Hinton did immediately respond to Insider’s request for additional comment ahead of publication…
