WASHINGTON (AP) — Raising alarm bells about artificial intelligence has become a popular pastime in the ChatGPT era, with businessman Elon Musk, left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky, 99-year-old former politician Henry Kissinger and others among others. featured by celebrities.
Of particular note, however, are the concerns of insiders in the AI research community.Pioneering researcher and so-called “Godfather of AI” Jeffrey Hinton I left my role at Google so I could speak more freely about the dangers of the technologies I helped develop.
During Hinton’s decades-long career, his pioneering work in deep learning and neural networks helped lay the foundation for many of the AI technologies we see today.
Hinton told the BBC that some of the dangers of AI chatbots are “very scary”.“Right now, as far as I know, they’re no smarter than us. But I think they might be soon.”
In an interview with MIT Technology ReviewHinton also pointed out “villains” who could use AI in ways that could have detrimental effects on society, such as manipulating elections or inciting violence.
Hinton, 75, said he left Google so he could speak candidly about potential risks as someone not working for the tech giant.
“We want to talk about AI safety issues without worrying about how AI will interact with Google’s business,” he told MIT Technology Review. “You can’t do that as long as you’re getting paid by Google.”
Google has confirmed that Hinton has stepped down from his role after overseeing the Google research team in Toronto for 10 years.
Hinton did not immediately respond to AP’s request for comment.
At the heart of the debate about the state of AI is whether the major dangers lie in the future or in the present. On one side are hypothetical scenarios of existential risk posed by computers replacing human intelligence. Another concern is about automation technologies that are already widely deployed by businesses and governments and that can harm the real world.
“For better or worse, what the chatbot moment has done is to make AI a national topic, not just for AI professionals and developers, but internationally,” White said by February. Driving the House Science Agency and Technology Policy and Guidelines for Responsible Use of AI Tools.
“AI is no longer an abstraction. This kind of opening opens up a new dialogue about what we want our democratic future and technology-driven, non-exploitative future to look like. I think they are,” Nelson said in an interview last month. .
Many AI researchers have long expressed concern about racial, gender, and other forms of bias in AI systems. This includes text-based large-scale language models that are trained on vast amounts of human sentences and can amplify the discrimination that exists in society.
Sarah Myers West, managing director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute, said: “The harm being caused by today’s AI systems is not really evenly distributed. It greatly exacerbates existing patterns of inequality.”
Hinton was one of three AI pioneers to receive a Turing Award in 2019. The Turing Awards have become known as the technology industry’s version of the Nobel Prize. His two other winners, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, have also expressed concerns about the future of AI.
Bengio, an academic and AI pioneer, signed the petition in late March. While asking tech companies to agree to halt development of powerful AI systems for six months, LeCun, the top AI scientist at Facebook parent company Meta, has taken a more optimistic approach. is taking
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AP Technology Reporter Matt O’Brien reports from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
