Artificial Intelligence (AI), the most discussed field of technology for some months now, has evolved into a state where it cannot be switched off. Though AI was invented by humans, the situation now is such that the latter may have to struggle to keep pace with the former. This is precisely what Dr Geoffrey Hinton, a man widely seen as the godfather of AI, tried to convey the other day, stirring a new debate. Dr Hinton, 75, announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, saying he now ‘regretted his work’.
The British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist told the BBC some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”. “Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be,” said Dr Hinton who also accepted that his age had played into his decision to leave the tech giant. Last Wednesday he told Will Douglas Heaven, senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review, at the publication’s EmTech conference, that at his age he is not as good at doing technical work as he used to be. “My memory is not as good and when I program, I forget to do things. So, it was time to retire.”
Dr Hinton’s pioneering research on neural networks and deep learning has paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT. In AI, neural networks are systems that are similar to the human brain in the way they learn and process information. They enable AI systems to learn from experience, as a person would. This is called deep learning. Dr Hinton told the BBC that chatbots could soon overtake the level of information that a human brain holds. “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,” he said. “And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that.”
In the New York Times article, Dr Hinton referred to “bad actors” who would try to use AI for “bad things”. When asked by the BBC to elaborate on this, he replied: “This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a nightmare scenario”. In his conversation with the MIT Technology Review, Dr Hinton said The New York Times reporter tried very hard to get him to say he had regrets in developing AI. “In the end, I said maybe I had slight regrets, which got reported that I had regrets. I don’t think I made any bad decisions in doing research. I think it was perfectly reasonable back in the ‘70s and ‘80s to do research on how to make artificial neural networks. It wasn’t really foreseeable — this stage of it wasn’t foreseeable. Until very recently, I thought this existential crisis was a long way off. So, I don’t really have any regrets over what I did.” Though Dr Hinton has clarified what he said, the debate will continue, until eventually AI evolves into an unassailable position.