Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In
2012, Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto
created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the AI systems
that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.
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On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of
critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive
campaign to create products based on generative AI, the technology that powers
popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has
worked for more than 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,” 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.
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,” 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 Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft, which has
deployed OpenAI’s technology across a wide range of products, including its
Bing search engine.
Hinton, often called “the Godfather of AI”, did not sign
either of those letters and said he did not want to publicly criticize Google
or other companies until he had quit his job. He notified the company last
month that he was resigning, and Thursday, he talked by phone with Sundar
Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. He declined to publicly
discuss the details of his conversation with Pichai.
Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, said in a statement:
“We remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We’re continually
learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”
Hinton, a 75-year-old British expatriate, is a lifelong
academic whose career was driven by his personal convictions about the
development and use of AI. In 1972, as a graduate student at the University of
Edinburgh, Hinton embraced an idea called a neural network. A neural network is
a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. At the time, few
researchers believed in the idea. But it became his life’s work.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”
In the 1980s, Hinton was a professor of computer science at
Carnegie Mellon University but left the university for Canada because he said
he was reluctant to take Pentagon funding. At the time, most AI research in the
US was funded by the Defense Department. Hinton is deeply opposed to the use of
AI on the battlefield — what he calls “robot soldiers”.
In 2012, Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya
Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, built a neural network that could analyze
thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects, such as
flowers, dogs, and cars.
Google spent $44 million to acquire a company started by
Hinton and his two students. And their system led to the creation of
increasingly powerful technologies, including new chatbots such as ChatGPT and
Google Bard. Sutskever went on to become chief scientist at OpenAI. In 2018, Hinton
and two other longtime collaborators received the Turing Award, often called
“the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on neural networks.
Around the same time, Google, OpenAI and other companies
began building neural networks that learned from huge amounts of digital text.
Hinton thought it was a powerful way for machines to understand and generate
language, but it was inferior to the way humans handled language.
Then, last year, as Google and OpenAI built systems using
much larger amounts of data, his view changed. He still believed the systems
were inferior to the human brain in some ways but he thought they were
eclipsing human intelligence in others. “Maybe what is going on in these
systems,” he said, “is actually a lot better than what is going on in the
brain”.
As companies improve their AI systems, he believes, they
become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is
now,” he said of AI technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards.
That’s scary.”
Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward”
for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But
now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot —
challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind
of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be
impossible to stop, Hinton said.
His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded
with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to
know what is true anymore”.
He is also worried that AI technologies will in time upend
the job market. Today, chatbots such as ChatGPT tend to complement human
workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators
and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It
might take away more than that.”
Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the
technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected
behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he
said, as individuals and companies allow AI systems not only to generate their
own computer code but actually to run that code on their own. And he fears a
day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than
people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was
way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even
longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Many other experts, including many of his students and
colleagues, say this threat is hypothetical. But Hinton believes that the race
between Google and Microsoft and others will escalate into a global race that
will not stop without some sort of global regulation.
But that may be impossible, he said. Unlike with nuclear
weapons, he said, there is no way of knowing whether companies or countries are
working on the technology in secret. The best hope is for the world’s leading
scientists to collaborate on ways of controlling the technology. “I don’t think
they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can
control it,” he said.
Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could
work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert
Oppenheimer, who led the US effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see
something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”
He does not say that anymore.
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