Geoffrey Hinton, often called the 'godfather of AI,' is a British-Canadian computer scientist whose pioneering work in neural networks and deep learning laid the foundation for modern AI systems like ChatGPT and Google Bard.

His major contributions include the development of backpropagation algorithms in the 1980s, which revolutionized machine learning by enabling neural networks to learn from data, and his 2012 breakthrough in image recognition, which earned him the Turing Award in 2018.

In 2023, Hinton resigned from Google to openly express concerns about the rapid advancement of AI, warning that it could surpass human intelligence and pose existential risks, such as misinformation, job displacement, and misuse by bad actors.

He has highlighted fears that AI systems could autonomously develop harmful sub-goals, like seeking power, and be exploited for disinformation, election interference, or weaponization, potentially destabilizing societies.

Hinton’s warnings have sparked widespread media coverage and debate, with some experts, including Elon Musk and the Future of Life Institute, calling for a pause in AI development to establish safety measures.

Other experts, such as Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, have echoed Hinton’s concerns, emphasizing the need for democratic oversight and stronger regulations to address risks like misinformation and societal inequalities.

Hinton has also expressed regret over his life’s work, acknowledging that AI’s rapid progress has exceeded expectations and raised urgent ethical and safety concerns.

Governments and organizations are responding, with initiatives like the UK’s AI summit and the US White House’s investment in AI research aiming to balance innovation with ethical safeguards.

Hinton’s resignation underscores the need for public awareness and education about AI, encouraging individuals to engage with its ethical implications and advocate for responsible development.

Geoffrey Hinton, often called the 'godfather of AI,' is a British-Canadian computer scientist whose pioneering work in neural networks and deep learning laid the foundation for modern AI systems like ChatGPT and Google Bard.

Title:

Content: The ‘Godfather of AI’ warns about potential dangers of the technology as he quits Google

British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton admits he has fears for the future of AI

In a Frankenstein-esque tale of maker and master, Geoffrey Hinton, 75, dubbed ‘the godfather of AI’, has left Google with a parting warning over the dangers of artificial intelligence.

In 2012, the British-Canadian computer scientist invented technology with two students at University of Toronto that would become the intellectual foundation for AI systems. Google purchased the rights to this neural network tech to the tune of $44 million, which also propelled Dr Hinton to receive the Turing Award in 2018, considered the Nobel Prize of computing.

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Yet now, Dr Hinton has packed in the day job at Google to join a chorus of anxious experts demanding a rollback of AI research until more robust safety measures are designed and deployed. Dr Hinton told the BBC: ‘Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.’

While many look upon AI as a natural technological development akin to the internet that could lead to exciting breakthroughs for humanity, there are growing fears that AI is a Pandora’s box. Reflecting on the effects of his work, Dr Hinton said: ‘I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody would have,’ as he admitted, ‘it is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.’

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The scientist went on to warn that AI could be taught to ‘create sub-goals like “I need to get more power”’, and be harnessed by nefarious actors to wreak havoc. With innovation driven forward by the unstoppable competition between behemoths like Google and Microsoft, Dr Hinton warned innovation will only increase exponentially in the coming years.

There are those who are trying to apply the brakes to this runaway train. In March, an open letter was signed by over 1,000 tech leaders and researchers, including Elon Musk and fellow Turing Award winner Yoshu Bengio, calling for a six-month moratorium on AI development. A few days later, 19 leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence released their own letter on the risks of AI. The signatures included that of Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft.

The main outcry over AI lies in its ability to create and disseminate false news and images, which the public may find increasingly hard to identify. AI also poses a threat to academia and careers (see: Tatler’s foray into the world of ChatGPT). Dr Hinton believes that AI will fundamentally disrupt the workplace and take over the ‘drudge work’.

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However Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, offered words of comfort, adding: 'We remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.’

What breakthroughs has Hinton achieved through his 40+ years of work on artificial neural networks?

Breakthroughs that mimic biological brains

Which AI system demonstrates the foundation laid by Hinton's pioneering research in deep learning and neural networks?

His major contributions include the development of backpropagation algorithms in the 1980s, which revolutionized machine learning by enabling neural networks to learn from data, and his 2012 breakthrough in image recognition, which earned him the Turing Award in 2018.

Title:

Content: Geoffrey Hinton: GPT-4 is 100 times more knowledgeable than any human
Author: MIAO Yongqi
Published: Updated:
Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as the "godfather of artificial intelligence", announced Monday that he has resigned from Google. He has devoted his life to developing artificial intelligence systems, saying he "regrets his life's work" and is wary of the potential dangers of AI development.
In another recent interview, Hinton further talked about why he is afraid of AI development.
Hinton, 75, left Google a few days after the news broke in an interview with MIT Technology Review senior editor Will Douglas Heaven.
Hinton points out that the new generation of AI language models, especially the GPT-4, which came out in March, made him realize that these machines were moving in a direction that was much smarter than he thought, and he was afraid of these developments.
He is best known for a technique he proposed in the 1980s (with two colleagues) called backpropagation.
In short, the algorithms that allow machines to learn support almost all of today ’ s artificial neural networks, from computer vision systems to large language models.
It wasn ’ t until the 2010s that Hinton and his two recent graduates developed a “neural network ” that demonstrated its power, stronger than any computer ’ s ability to identify objects in images, and trained it to predict the next letter of a sentence, a precursor to today ’ s large-scale language patterns.
One of the students was Ilya Sutskever, the founder of OpenAI, who led the development of ChatGPT.
“We first thought it might be great. ”“ But it ’ s going to take a long time to realize that it needs to be done on a large scale to get good results. ”
In the 1980s, the discussion of “neural networks ” was considered a joke.
But Hinton doesn ’ t think so, and is working on this, software that mimics the abstract human brain and uses code as a connection between neurons. For 40 years, Hinton has viewed artificial neural networks as a clumsy attempt to mimic biological neural networks.
Now he thinks things have changed: he thinks there are better results when trying to mimic the behavior of the biological brain.
“It ’ s scary when you see it with your own eyes, ” he said.“ It ’ s a sudden change. ”
So why did ChatGPT surprise Hinton, too? He explained that the human brain has about 100 trillion connections, and “large language models have up to 500 billion, up to a trillion. ”
However, the knowledge of GPT-4 is a hundred times greater than that of any human.
So maybe it actually has a better learning algorithm than we do. "
He also pointed out that apart from the ability to learn, the ability to communicate is another kind of point.
“If you or I learn a new thing and want to teach it to another person, we can ’ t just send them a copy. ”
But artificial neural networks can do it.
It ’ s like there are 10,000 people here, and when one person learns a new thing, the other 9,999 people all learn it at the same time.
Hinton now believes that there are two types of intelligence: animal brains and artificial neural networks.
“It ’ s a completely different kind of intelligence.
“A new, better intelligence. ” Hinton believes that whether superintelligence is good or bad depends largely on whether you ’ re an optimist or a pessimist, and he says,“ mildly depressed, ” “that ’ s why I ’ m afraid. ”
“Whether these things are going to be smarter than us, I suddenly changed my mind. ”
I think they are very close to us now and they will be much smarter than us in the future, ” he said.
“How do we survive? ” he is particularly worried that people will use the tools he has developed to change the trajectory of human life, including elections and wars.
He said that he hopes to continue talking about AI security after leaving office and spend more time on “more philosophical work ”.“ As long as I ’ m still employed at Google, I can ’ t say what I want to say, ” he said. “I have a lot of good things to say about Google, and it would be more convincing if I wasn ’ t at Google. ”
Who is the godfather of AI computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton?
Hinton pioneered the basic technology of AI systems and became interested in artificial neural networks when he was a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh in 1972. In 2018, he and two experts in the field of deep learning were awarded the Turing Award, known as the “Nobel Prize in Computing ”.
What are the main concerns of “AI Godfather ” Geoffrey Hinton about the development of artificial intelligence?
He believes that the most direct impact is to promote the dissemination of false information and the loss of employment opportunities, and also worries about the use of this tool for evil, such as influencing elections and using it in war.

Which prestigious award did Hinton receive in 2018 for his work on neural networks?

In 2023, Hinton resigned from Google to openly express concerns about the rapid advancement of AI, warning that it could surpass human intelligence and pose existential risks, such as misinformation, job displacement, and misuse by bad actors.

Title:

Content: AI Godfather Hinton: Artificial intelligence threatens humanity more urgently than climate change
Central News Agency
Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI), said in an interview with Reuters today that the threat posed by AI to humans may be “more urgent ” than climate change.
This is an advertisement, please continue reading.
Hinton, 75, who is regarded as one of the “godfathers ” of artificial intelligence, recently announced his departure from Alphabet, a 10-year tech company, because he wanted to make the risks of artificial intelligence public without involving employers.
Hinton ’ s research has been recognized as an important contribution to the development of contemporary AI systems. In 1986, he co-authored the influential paper Learning Representations by Back-propagating Errors, which set a milestone in the development of neural networks supporting AI technology. In 2018, he received the Turing Award for his research breakthroughs. And...
Hinton is one of a growing number of technology leaders who are concerned that machine intelligence will surpass humans and ultimately control the planet, and are openly raising concerns about the potential threat posed by AI.
“I ’ m not trying to downplay the importance of climate change, nor am I saying we shouldn ’ t worry about climate change, which is also a big risk, ” Hinton said.
But I think (artificial intelligence) may be more urgent in the end. "
“When it comes to climate change, making recommendations is simple: just stop carbon emissions.
If you do that, things will get better.
And when it comes to (artificial intelligence), there ’ s nothing we can do about it. ”
OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence research lab sponsored by technology company Microsoft, launched ChatGPT, a chatbot that took the first shot at the AI race last November and quickly became the fastest-growing app in history, with 100 million monthly active users in just two months.
In April, thousands of people signed an open letter calling on all AI labs to suspend development of systems more powerful than OpenAI ’ s recently launched GPT-4 for at least six months, including social media CEO Elon Musk, AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.
Hinton shares the concerns of the co-authors, who fear AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, but he disagrees with the suspension of research.
He said, “It ’ s not practical.
I agree that this is an existential risk, and it ’ s close, and it ’ s time to put a lot of effort into understanding what we can do. ”
Following the publication of the joint letter, the 12 members of the European Parliament called on leaders such as U.S. President Joe Biden and European Union Executive Committee Chairman Ursula von der Leyen to convene a summit to discuss how to control the development of advanced artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT, which are developing faster than expected.
“Technology leaders know best about [artificial intelligence], and politics must be involved, ” says Hinton.
This matter concerns all of us, so we must all think carefully. ”
This is an advertisement, please continue reading.

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

Poses ethical risks
Becomes uncontrollable

What future risk did Hinton warn about AI?

What risks did Hinton associate with AI's rapid advancement?

What risks did the global summit report highlight about AI?

Creating malicious software for cyberattacks, potentially posing an existential threat if humans lose control.

Why did Hinton leave Google when he helped develop AI but later grew concerned about its dangers?

He has highlighted fears that AI systems could autonomously develop harmful sub-goals, like seeking power, and be exploited for disinformation, election interference, or weaponization, potentially destabilizing societies.

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

What did Sam Altman admit about ChatGPT and the potential risks of AI?

Advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity.

What does Hinton warn "bad actors" could use AI for?

To win wars or manipulate the electorate.

What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

Poses ethical risks
Becomes uncontrollable

What risks did Hinton associate with AI's rapid advancement?

Hinton’s warnings have sparked widespread media coverage and debate, with some experts, including Elon Musk and the Future of Life Institute, calling for a pause in AI development to establish safety measures.

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

Other experts, such as Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, have echoed Hinton’s concerns, emphasizing the need for democratic oversight and stronger regulations to address risks like misinformation and societal inequalities.

Title:

Content: Governments, firms should spend more on AI safety, top researchers say

By

'At least one third of their AI research and development funding'.

Artificial intelligence companies and governments should allocate at least one third of their AI research and development funding to ensuring the safety and ethical use of the systems, top AI researchers said in a paper.

The paper, issued a week before the international AI Safety Summit in London, lists measures that governments and companies should take to address AI risks.

"Governments should also mandate that companies are legally liable for harms from their frontier AI systems that can be reasonably foreseen and prevented," according to the paper written by three Turing Award winners, a Nobel laureate, and more than a dozen top AI academics.

Currently there are no broad-based regulations focusing on AI safety, and the first set of legislation by the European Union is yet to become law as lawmakers are yet to agree on several issues.

"Recent state of the art AI models are too powerful, and too significant, to let them develop without democratic oversight," said Yoshua Bengio, one of the three people known as the godfather of AI.

"It (investments in AI safety) needs to happen fast, because AI is progressing much faster than the precautions taken," he said.

Authors include Geoffrey Hinton, Andrew Yao, Daniel Kahneman, Dawn Song and Yuval Noah Harari.

Since the launch of OpenAI's generative AI models, top academics and prominent CEOs such as Elon Musk have warned about the risks on AI, including calling for a six-month pause in developing powerful AI systems.

Some companies have countered this, saying they will face high compliance costs and disproportionate liability risks.

"Companies will complain that it's too hard to satisfy regulations - that 'regulation stifles innovation' - that's ridiculous," said British computer scientist Stuart Russell.

"There are more regulations on sandwich shops than there are on AI companies."

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What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

What risks did Hinton associate with AI's rapid advancement?

Hinton has also expressed regret over his life’s work, acknowledging that AI’s rapid progress has exceeded expectations and raised urgent ethical and safety concerns.

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

Governments and organizations are responding, with initiatives like the UK’s AI summit and the US White House’s investment in AI research aiming to balance innovation with ethical safeguards.

Title:

Content: Skip to main contentSkip to navigation

UK and US intervene amid AI industry’s rapid advances

Competition and Markets Authority sends ‘pre-warning’ to sector, while White House announces measures to address risks

The UK and US have intervened in the race to develop ever more powerful artificial intelligence technology, as the British competition watchdog launched a review of the sector and the White House advised tech firms of their fundamental responsibility to develop safe products.

Regulators are under mounting pressure to intervene, as the emergence of AI-powered language generators such as ChatGPT raises concerns about the potential spread of misinformation, a rise in fraud and the impact on the jobs market, with Elon Musk among nearly 30,000 signatories to a letter published last month urging a pause in significant projects.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Thursday it would look at the underlying systems – or foundation models – behind AI tools. The initial review, described by one legal expert as a “pre-warning” to the sector, will publish its findings in September.

On the same day, the US government announced measures to address the risks in AI development, as Kamala Harris, the vice-president, met chief executives at the forefront of the industry’s rapid advances. In a statement, the White House said firms developing the technology had a “fundamental responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are deployed or made public”.

The meeting capped a week during which a succession of scientists and business leaders issued warnings about the speed at which the technology could disrupt established industries. On Monday, Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI”, quit Google in order to speak more freely about the technology’s dangers, while the UK government’s outgoing scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, urged ministers to “get ahead” of the profound social and economic changes that could be triggered by AI, saying the impact on jobs could be as big as that of the Industrial Revolution.

Sarah Cardell said AI had the potential to “transform” the way businesses competed, but that consumers must be protected.

The CMA chief executive said: “AI has burst into the public consciousness over the past few months but has been on our radar for some time. It’s crucial that the potential benefits of this transformative technology are readily accessible to UK businesses and consumers while people remain protected from issues like false or misleading information.”

ChatGPT and Google’s rival Bard service are prone to delivering false information in response to users’ prompts, while concerns have been raised about AI-generated voice scams. The anti-misinformation outfit NewsGuard said this week that chatbots pretending to be journalists were running almost 50 AI-generated “content farms”. Last month, a song featuring fake AI-generated vocals purporting to be Drake and the Weeknd was pulled from streaming services.

The CMA review will look at how the markets for foundation models could evolve, what opportunities and risks there are for consumers and competition, and formulate “guiding principles” to support competition and protect consumers.

The leading players in AI are Microsoft, ChatGPT developer OpenAI – in which Microsoft is an investor – and Google parent Alphabet, which owns a world-leading AI business in UK-based DeepMind, while leading AI startups include Anthropic and Stability AI, the British company behind Stable Diffusion.

Alex Haffner, competition partner at the UK law firm Fladgate, said: “Given the direction of regulatory travel at the moment and the fact the CMA is deciding to dedicate resource to this area, its announcement must be seen as some form of pre-warning about aggressive development of AI programmes without due scrutiny being applied.”

In the US, Harris met the chief executives of OpenAI, Alphabet and Microsoft at the White House, and outlined measures to address the risks of unchecked AI development. In a statement following the meeting, Harris said she told the executives that “the private sector has an ethical, moral, and legal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of their products”.

The administration said it would invest $140m (£111m) in seven new national AI research institutes, to pursue artificial intelligence advances that are “ethical, trustworthy, responsible, and serve the public good”. AI development is dominated by the private sector, with the tech industry producing 32 significant machine-learning models last year, compared with three produced by academia.

Leading AI developers have also agreed to their systems being publicly evaluated at this year’s Defcon 31 cybersecurity conference. Companies that have agreed to participate include OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Stability AI.

“This independent exercise will provide critical information to researchers and the public about the impacts of these models,” said the White House.

Robert Weissman, the president of the consumer rights non-profit Public Citizen, praised the White House’s announcement as a “useful step” but said more aggressive action is needed. Weissman said this should including a moratorium on the deployment of new generative AI technologies, the term for tools such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.

“At this point, Big Tech companies need to be saved from themselves. The companies and their top AI developers are well aware of the risks posed by generative AI. But they are in a competitive arms race and each believes themselves unable to slow down,” he said.

The EU was also told on Thursday that it must protect grassroots AI research or risk handing control of the technology’s development to US firms.

In an open letter coordinated by the German research group Laion – or Large-scale AI Open Network – the European parliament was told that one-size-fits-all rules risked eliminating open research and development.

“Rules that require a researcher or developer to monitor or control downstream use could make it impossible to release open-source AI in Europe,” which would “entrench large firms” and “hamper efforts to improve transparency, reduce competition, limit academic freedom, and drive investment in AI overseas”, the letter said.

“Europe cannot afford to lose AI sovereignty. Eliminating open-source R&D will leave the European scientific community and economy critically dependent on a handful of foreign and proprietary firms for essential AI infrastructure.”

The largest AI efforts, by companies such as OpenAI and Google, are heavily controlled by their creators. It is impossible to download the model behind ChatGPT, for instance, and the paid-for access that OpenAI provides to customers comes with a number of legal and technical restrictions on how it can be used. By contrast, open-source efforts involve creating a model and then releasing it for anyone to use, improve or adapt as they see fit.

“We are working on open-source AI because we think that sort of AI will be more safe, more accessible and more democratic,” said Christoph Schuhmann, the organisational lead at Laion.

More on this story

More on this story

  • US aims to tackle risk of uncontrolled race to develop AI

  • EU urged to protect grassroots AI research or risk losing out to US

  • UK competition watchdog launches review of AI market

  • AI ‘could be as transformative as Industrial Revolution’

  • Chatbot ‘journalists’ found running almost 50 AI-generated content farms

  • ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and warns over dangers of misinformation

  • AI has better ‘bedside manner’ than some doctors, study finds

  • Fresh concerns raised over sources of training material for AI systems

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What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

Hinton’s resignation underscores the need for public awareness and education about AI, encouraging individuals to engage with its ethical implications and advocate for responsible development.

What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

Why did Hinton leave Google when he helped develop AI but later grew concerned about its dangers?