Now regretting his life’s work, ‘The Godfather of A.I.’ leaves Google and warns of dangers ahead

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton’s journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton says.

Cade Metz for The New York Times:

Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.

On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.

Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work…

In 2018, Dr. Hinton and two other longtime collaborators received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on neural networks… As companies improve their A.I. systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of A.I. technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”

MacDailyNews Take: The problem with generative A.I. is that it’s crowdsourced and the crowd ain’t too bright.

The quality of generative A.I. depends on what you feed it. Garbage in, garbage out. Generative A.I. is what it eats.

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