Geoffrey Hinton resigns from Google

One of the pioneers of artificial intelligence AI, Geoffrey Hinton,  has quit his job at Google, warning about the growing dangers of developments in the field.

Geoffrey Hinton announced his resignation from Google in a statement to reporters. He said he regretted his work and revealed that some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”.

“Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”

Hinton also accepted that his age had played into his decision to leave the tech giant, “I’m 75, so it’s time to retire.”

Hinton’s pioneering research on neural networks and deep learning has paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT.

In artificial intelligence, neural networks are systems that are similar to the human brain in the way they learn and process information. They enable AIs to learn from experience, as a person would. This is called deep learning.

The British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist said that chatbots could soon overtake the level of information that a human brain holds.

“Right now, what we’re seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning,” he said.

“And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that.”

BBC/Ramadan Onilegbale