‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google over killer robot fears

A SCIENTIST dubbed the ‘godfather’ of Artificial Intelligence has quit his job at Google to warn killer robots could turn against humans.

Geoffrey Hinton said he regrets his work on AI as he left the tech giant in order to speak out about the technology’s “profound risks to society and humanity”.

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The British scientist began work on the ideas that underpin AI in the early 1970s and joined Google in 2013, when it paid $44 billion to buy a company started by him and two of his students.

But the 75-year-old has come to be an outspoken critic of what he warns are its potential misuses and says part of him regrets the work he has done.

“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” he told the New York Times.

Hinton was the head of the Google Brain research department before he quit and in 2018, he and two colleagues received the Turing Award, known as the ‘Nobel Prize of computing’.

Speaking to the BBC, Hinton said he feared “bad actors” such as Vladimir Putin could use AI for “bad things”.

“This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a nightmare scenario,” he said.

“You can imagine, for example, some bad actor Putin decided to give robots the ability to create their own sub-goals.”

Eventually these sub-goals could include ‘I need to get more power’, he warned.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have.

“We’re biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world.

“And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly.

“So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it.

“And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”

Hinton’s warnings comes in the wake of other concerns about AI, including that it is already close enough to “human level” to create full relationships with people

In 2022, the tech giant and OpenAI – the start-up behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT – started building systems using much larger amounts of data than before.

An open letter, signed by more than 1,000 people including Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, called for a six months halt in the development of AI systems.

The letter was prompted by the release of GPT-4, a much more powerful version of the technology used by ChatGPT.

“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,” Hinton said.

“In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning.

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

Hinton student experimental psychology at King’s College, Cambridge, and was later awarded a PhD in AI from the University of Edinburgh in 1978.

He told Google of his resignation last month, the New York Times reported.

Jeff Dean, lead scientist for Google AI, thanked Hinton in a statement to US media.

“As one of the first companies to publish AI Principles, we remain committed to a responsible approach to AI,” the statement added.

“We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”