Over the past few years we have seen impressive advances in the field of artificial intelligence. However, it has not been until a couple of years ago when many of us have begun to be much more interested in the capabilities that it houses. 2022 was a year to remember in this sense, since it was when we learned of the existence of tools such as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, among others, for the generation of images through AI, or ChatGPT, the well-known OpenAI chatbot. who surprises us more and more with his answers.
However, the fact of this notable growth in interest in artificial intelligence has also given rise to thinking about its dangers, since there are many who consider it as double-edged weapon and keeping it away from those who want to use it to cause damage is very difficult. Geoffrey Hinton, considered by many to be “the godfather of AI,” and who recently left his position at Google with “regret” and “fear” about his life’s work, has a lot to say about this.
Geoffrey Hinton predicts a worrisome future with AI
Hinton has been one of the people who have contributed the most in the field of artificial intelligence in recent years. He was awarded the Turing Award in 2018 along with others for work that has led to many of the capabilities that artificial intelligence harbors today.
In a recent interview for the New York Times, Geoffrey Hinton says that part of him regrets his work. In fact, just a few days ago he surprised Leaving Google in order to talk about the risks of AI completely independently and freely.
“I console myself with the usual excuse: if I hadn’t done it, someone else would have done it. It’s hard to see how you can prevent wrongdoers from using it for bad things.”
Hinton had been with Google for more than a decade. However, last month he announced his resignation from the company. He had a face-to-face conversation with Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, according to the New York Times. However, the details of this have not been revealed.
Google acquired the company started by Hinton and two of his students, one of whom became part of OpenAI as chief scientist. Hinton and his students developed a neural network that learned independently to identify common objects such as dogs, cats and flowers, after analyzing thousands of photographs. Part of this work served to create artificial intelligences such as ChatGPT or Google Bard.
That Microsoft released Bing with ChatGPT was a hard blow for Google, to such an extent that its own CEO alerted his employees with a “red code”. Hinton comments in the interview that that competition was impossible to stop and that this would end up resulting in a world with so much fake photography and text that “no one could identify what is true anymore.”
“The idea that this could become smarter than people, a few bought it. But most people thought it was very far from reality. And so did I. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even away.” more. Obviously, I don’t think that anymore.”
To clarify the possible misunderstandings that the interview could give rise to, Hinton himself wrote a tweet ensuring that he left Google to talk about the risks of AI without considering the impact of these words on his company. He also comments that so far Google has acted in a “very responsible” way.
For Hinton, misinformation is one of their main concerns. In fact, he believes that in the long term, artificial intelligence would eliminate jobs that depend on repetition. On a much more pessimistic spectrum, he also comments that even humanity could be wiped out when AI starts writing and running its own code.
Image | The Quint
Via | The Verge
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