Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the "godfathers
of AI", recently announced he had quit Alphabet after a decade at the
firm, saying he wanted to speak out on the risks of the technology without it
affecting his former employer.
Hinton's work is considered essential to the development of
contemporary AI systems. In 1986, he co-authored the seminal paper
"Learning representations by back-propagating errors", a milestone in
the development of the neural networks undergirding AI technology. In 2018, he
was awarded the Turing Award in recognition of his research breakthroughs.
But he is now among a growing number of tech leaders
publicly espousing concern about the possible threat posed by AI if machines
were to achieve greater intelligence than humans and take control of the
planet.
"I wouldn't like to devalue climate change. I wouldn't
like to say, 'You shouldn't worry about climate change.' That's a huge risk
too," Hinton said. "But I think this might end up being more
urgent."
He added: "With climate change, it's very easy to
recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon. If you do that,
eventually things will be okay. For this it's not at all clear what you should
do."
Microsoft-backed OpenAI fired the starting pistol on a
technological arms race in November, when it made AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT
available to the public. It soon became the fastest-growing app in history,
reaching 100 million monthly users in two months.
In April, Twitter CEO Elon Musk joined thousands in signing
an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of systems more
powerful than OpenAI's recently-launched GPT-4.
Signatories included Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque,
researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, and fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio
and Stuart Russell.
While Hinton shares signatories concern that AI may prove to
be an existential threat to mankind, he disagreed with pausing research.
“It's utterly unrealistic,” he said. “I'm in the camp that
thinks this is an existential risk, and it's close enough that we ought to be
working very hard right now, and putting a lot of resources into figuring out
what we can do about it.”
In the European Union, a committee of lawmakers responded to
the Musk-backed letter, calling on US President Joe Biden to convene a global
summit on the future direction of the technology with European Commission
President Ursula von der Leyen.
Last week, the committee agreed a landmark set of proposals
targeting generative AI, which would force companies like OpenAI to disclose
any copyright material used to train their models.
Meanwhile, Biden held talks with a number of AI company
leaders, including Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the
White House, promising a "frank and constructive discussion" on the
need for companies to be more transparent about their systems.
“The tech leaders have the best understanding of it, and the
politicians have to be involved,” said Hinton. “It affects us all, so we all
have to think about it.” © Reuters