The computer scientist, Turing Award winner in 2018, Geoffrey Hinton, considered the “godfather” of the Artificial intelligence (IA), has warned about the dangers of the technology he helped create, after resigning from his position at Google to be able to speak more freely about the subject.
Hinton’s pioneering work, developed over his decades-long career of research in deep learning and neural networks, helped lay the foundation for much of the artificial intelligence technology known today, according to a report. report from the agency Associated Press (AP).
The 75-year-old expert told the outlet that he retired from Google so that he could speak openly about the potential risks as someone who no longer works for the tech giant.
“I want to talk about AI security issues without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he told the outlet, who oversaw the company’s research team in Toronto for 10 years.
In recent months, the most up-to-date advances in this new technology have come to light. The startup San Francisco-based OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, released GPT-4, its latest artificial intelligence model, in March. Other big companies technological They have invested heavily in tools that can compete, including Google with “Bard”.
Hinton said that Google has “acted very responsibly” with regard to AI, and that there are “a lot of good things about Google” that he would like to talk about, but those comments would be “much more credible if I’m not at Google anymore.” .
Some of the dangers of chatbot of AI have been considered by the American expert as “quite terrifying”. “At the moment, they are not smarter than us, from what I can tell. But I think they will soon be, ”she recently told the BBC.
The medium also refers to statements by the specialist to MIT Technology Review, In which he points out that “bad actors” can use AI in ways that could have a detrimental impact on society, citing election rigging and incitement to violence as examples of such unintended effects.
Hinton was one of three AI pioneers to win the 2019 Turing Award, an honor known as the tech industry’s version of the Nobel Prize. The other two winners, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, also expressed concern about the future of this technology.
According to PA, Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, signed a petition in late March calling on tech companies to agree to a six-month pause on developing powerful AI systems.
LeCun, a leading scientist on the subject at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has taken more optimistic positions on this issue, says the US agency.
It is currently debated whether the main dangers of this new technology are in the future or in the present. On the one hand, PA points out that there are the hypothetical scenarios of existential risk caused by computers that surpass human intelligence. On the other hand, concerns about automated technology that companies and governments are already widely deploying can cause real-world harm.
“For better or for worse, what the moment of chatbot it is to make AI a national and international conversation that does not only include experts and developers,” said Alondra Nelson, who until February headed the White House Office of Science and Technology.
“AI is no longer abstract, and we have this kind of openness, I think, to have a new conversation about how we want a democratic future and a future without exploitation with technology,” Nelson said in an interview.
Several AI researchers have raised concerns that racial, gender, and other biases that technology, which includes long text-based language models that are trained on large amounts of human writing, can amplify discrimination that exists. in society.
“We need to take a step back and really think about whose needs are being put front and center in the risk discussion,” said Sarah Myers West, CEO of the nonprofit AI Now Institute.
“The current damages that are being promulgated by the AI systems are actually not evenly distributed. It is greatly exacerbating existing patterns of inequality,” she said.
