‘Godfather of AI’ Fears Future of Superintelligence

Geoffrey Hinton - affectionately known as the ‘Godfather of AI’ for his work in building a neural network with two students at University of Toronto?- parted ways with Google on Monday (1 May) as he “[wants] to talk about AI safety issues without having to worry about how it interacts with [the company’s] business,” according to?MIT Technology Review.

Hinton, who joined 谷歌 in 2013, claimed technology such as GPT-4 (a language model created by OpenAI that can generate text that is similar to human speech) is much smarter than originally anticipated by the AI mogul.

“These things are totally different from us,” he said.?

“Sometimes I think it’s as if aliens had landed and people haven’t realized because they speak very good English.”

Instead, Hinton plans to focus on “more philosophical work” concerning the new generation of large language models such as “quite scary” AI chatbots which may soon be smarter than humans, he told?BBC.?

Discussing the quickly-evolving role of AI in society, Hinton explained: “Whether you think superintelligence is going to be good or bad depends very much on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist.

“If you ask people to estimate the risks of bad things happening, like what’s the chance of someone in your family getting really sick or being hit by a car, an optimist might say 5% and a pessimist might say it’s guaranteed to happen. But the mildly depressed person will say the odds are maybe around 40%, and they’re usually right.”

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