TORONTO – Dr Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer.
In 2012, Dr Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the artificial intelligence (AI) systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.
On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing towards danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative AI, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Dr Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he worked for more than a decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of AI.
A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Dr Hinton said during a lengthy interview last week in the dining room of his home in Toronto, a short walk from where he and his students made their breakthrough.
Dr Hinton’s journey from AI groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades.
Industry leaders believe the new AI systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s, and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education.
But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild.
Generative AI can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr Hinton said.
After the San Francisco startup OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT in March, more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of new systems because AI technologies pose “profound risks to society and humanity”.
Several days later, 19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society, released their own letter warning of the risks of AI.
That group included Mr Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft, which has deployed OpenAI’s technology across a wide range of products, including its Bing search engine.
Dr Hinton, often called “the Godfather of AI”, did not sign either of those letters and said he did not want to publicly criticise Google or other companies until he had quit his job.
He notified the company last month that he was resigning, and on Thursday, he talked by phone with Mr Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
He declined to publicly discuss the details of his conversation with Mr Pichai.