Google’s ‘Godfather of AI’ leaves the company to warn society over threats of technology

We have seen that people do change and that is what we are seeing right now with a top employee at Google as well. Right now, we are talking about Google’s Geoffrey Hinton who has been working at the company almost since it was founded and he is also known as the “Godfather of AI” in the Silicon Valley because of the progress he has done in the research and development of this technology. However, he now sees AI as a threat to the humanity and wants to have stricter regulations put in place so that there is no chaos due to AI technology such as ChatGPT and Google’s own Bard.

Due to that reason, Geoffrey Hinton has decided to quit Google and leave his high-profile job. It is worth noting that Hinton had received his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence 45 years ago and he has not looked back on the technology ever since then. He told the reporters that “I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away,” but now he says that “Obviously, I no longer think that.” which is to tell you that he thought AI still had a long time to go but the release of powerful AI tools has made him realize that AI is here already but he believes we are not ready for it just yet.

Hinton added that “I now think the digital intelligences we are creating are very different from biological intelligences.” and said that “If I have 1,000 digital agents who are all exact clones with identical weights, whenever one agent learns how to do something, all of them immediately know it because they share weights,”. “Biological agents cannot do this. So collections of identical digital agents can acquire hugely more knowledge than any individual biological agent. That is why GPT-4 knows hugely more than anyone.” He even goes on to say that he believes it is possible that “chances are of AI just wiping out humanity.” He added, “It’s not inconceivable. That’s all I’ll say.” Coming from the “Godfather of AI”, this is huge. We might just see history repeating itself just like we saw the dot-com bubble in the year 2000.