Geoffrey Hinston, known as “the godfather of Artificial Intelligence,” has been warning about the potential dangers of the current development and control of AI for over a year since he left his position at Google, and in a recent interview he has exploded against how companies are building this technology.
Hinston is a 76-year-old man who has earned the nickname godfather of AI, having revolutionized this technology on two occasions, making it possible for it to reach the level it has today. This is because, on the one hand, his work on neural networks managed to build a computer architecture similar to the human brain, giving machines the ability to reason similarly to people.
But not satisfied with that, Hinston also developed the first chatbot powered by AI that stood out for its deep learning, which earned him the Turing Award in 2018, commonly known as the Nobel Prize of computing.
The godfather of AI sold his company to Google in 2012, and since then, until last year, he worked for the company on its AI projects. However, it was last year that he made a strong statement and left the lifelong work to be able to warn freely and without conditions about the dangers of this technology.
It was in a new interview where Hinston talked at length about how he has seen the evolution of AI in the last year, and has pointed out that to his surprise, there has been so much progress that today there are numerous AI tools and platforms available to anyone that can be very dangerous.
For the godfather, this represents a serious mistake, as it allows malicious actors, whether cybercriminals, scammers, or any kind of bad person, to carry out their schemes for their benefit, as we have already seen numerous cases of million-dollar thefts, deepfakes, and more.
This whole situation, as he himself has stated, has caused him to lose sleep at night due to concern about the uncontrolled advancement of AI. In fact, he had always ignored the existential threat that it could end humanity and now believes “there are many possibilities that this could happen.”
To support his concern, Hinston uses Covid-19 in the sense that despite being a virus, not being intelligent, and unable to make decisions, it has managed to condition the entire planet for years.
But the godfather of AI is not the only one concerned about the development of this technology, and as we have seen in recent weeks, numerous employees of OpenAI, who were key in the company, like the co-founder, Ilya Sutskever, have left due to security concerns.
