Geoffrey Hinton, 'Godfather of AI' quits Google

Geoffrey Hinton, referred to as 'the Godfather of A.I.' has left Google after a decade. He intends to speak about the “dangers” and risks of the technology which he helped to develop. His departure marks an important pivot in the development of AI as Hinton is also banding together with other critics to warn of the potential dangers of AI. The artificial intelligence pioneer created the intellectual foundation for the AI systems that power today's chatbots like ChatGPT. 

In his tweet, he wrote, "In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly. I can now just speak freely about what I think the dangers might be. And some of them are quite scary. Right now, as far as I can tell, they're not more intelligent than us. But I think they soon may be."

"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. And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that,'' he noted.

Hinton also expressed his concerns about AI's potential to eliminate jobs and create a world where many will 'not be able to know what is true anymore.' He also expressed concerns about the spread of fake imagery and text.