THE CABLE
Geoffrey Hinton, a scientist regarded as the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI), has quit his job at Google over fears of growing dangers from innovations in the field.
Hinton announced his resignation in a statement shared with the New York Times on Monday, saying he now regrets his work.
In 2012, Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created the technology that became the intellectual foundation for AI systems.
Commenting on recent advancements in the field, Hinton said tech companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative AI, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
“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,” the Times quoted the scientist as saying.
In a separate interview with the BBC on Tuesday, Hinton described the situation as a nightmare.
“This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a nightmare scenario. 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,” he said.
