05-03-2023 , 05:09 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/to...66fd&ei=24
National Post
Toronto prof called Godfather of A.I. quits Google to warn world about the dangerous technology
Story by Adrian Humphreys • Yesterday 2:16 p.m. When he was a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, Geoffrey Hinton revolutionized the way machines interact with people and the world. His work was so innovative, he was scooped up by Google and dubbed the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence.
As A.I. explodes into the public realm with leaping enhancements, however, he is now frightened by his child.
He has quit his job at Google, he said, “so that I could talk about the dangers of A.I.”
Hinton’s remarkable shift from leading A.I. proponent to A.I. klaxon pushes concerns over the rapid pace of its development from the confines of the scientific community and chronic doomsayers.
Hinton, 75, is starting to regret his life’s work, according to a feature interview in The New York Times .
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton told reporter Cade Metz from Hinton’s Toronto home.
“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” Hinton is quoted saying about the pace of development of A.I. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
Right now it is not so much the machines, but the people using them.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”
The immediate danger, he said, was A.I.’s ability to create convincing false photos, videos and audio — showing things that didn’t happen or weren’t done by the people seen or heard in the generated content.
Most people, he said, will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”
He said A.I. can also destroy job sectors by replacing human workers.
Then, he warns, could come something even more frightening.
With A.I. systems consuming so much data and reaching some unexpected conclusions, mixed with the ability of an A.I. machine to write its own computer code, it can lead to a “nightmare scenario,” he told the BBC .
“Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be,” he said.
“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.”
His simple explanations in interviews show why he was a good university professor. He spells out an advantage machines have over humans when it comes to learning.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have,” he said to the BBC.
“We’re biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world. And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly.
“So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”
Hinton, born in Britain, came to Canada in 1987 after holding teaching positions in the United States, to work as a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, and later became a Canadian citizen.
His research here was transformational.
His Toronto research group made major breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification.
The ideas and research on deep neural networks emerging from the startup company he created with two of his graduate students was so exciting Google didn’t just recruit him, they bought the whole company in 2012 for $44 million.
Hinton then divided his time between the university and Google, and in 2016 he was named a Google vice president and engineering fellow running Google’s artificial intelligence lab in Toronto. He retired from teaching at the university and retained a professor emeritus status.
He was named a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2018 for being “the driving force behind the development of a new form of artificial intelligence.”
His pioneering and influential work in A.I. was honoured in 2019 when he won the A.M. Turing Award, dubbed the Nobel Prize of computing, alongside two collaborators, Yann LeCun, of Facebook and New York University, and Yoshua Bengio, of Université de Montréal. Hinton complained on Twitter that the piece in The New York Times made it seem he was attacking his former employer, Google.
“Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly,” he said in a tweet.
Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, confirmed Hinton’s departure, praising Hinton’s “foundational breakthroughs” in A.I. and his contributions to Google.
Dean said in his statement that Google is committed to responsible A.I. development and is continually learning to understand emerging risks.
National Post
Toronto prof called Godfather of A.I. quits Google to warn world about the dangerous technology
Story by Adrian Humphreys • Yesterday 2:16 p.m. When he was a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, Geoffrey Hinton revolutionized the way machines interact with people and the world. His work was so innovative, he was scooped up by Google and dubbed the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence.
As A.I. explodes into the public realm with leaping enhancements, however, he is now frightened by his child.
He has quit his job at Google, he said, “so that I could talk about the dangers of A.I.”
Hinton’s remarkable shift from leading A.I. proponent to A.I. klaxon pushes concerns over the rapid pace of its development from the confines of the scientific community and chronic doomsayers.
Hinton, 75, is starting to regret his life’s work, according to a feature interview in The New York Times .
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton told reporter Cade Metz from Hinton’s Toronto home.
“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” Hinton is quoted saying about the pace of development of A.I. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
Right now it is not so much the machines, but the people using them.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”
The immediate danger, he said, was A.I.’s ability to create convincing false photos, videos and audio — showing things that didn’t happen or weren’t done by the people seen or heard in the generated content.
Most people, he said, will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”
He said A.I. can also destroy job sectors by replacing human workers.
Then, he warns, could come something even more frightening.
With A.I. systems consuming so much data and reaching some unexpected conclusions, mixed with the ability of an A.I. machine to write its own computer code, it can lead to a “nightmare scenario,” he told the BBC .
“Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be,” he said.
“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.”
His simple explanations in interviews show why he was a good university professor. He spells out an advantage machines have over humans when it comes to learning.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have,” he said to the BBC.
“We’re biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world. And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly.
“So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”
Hinton, born in Britain, came to Canada in 1987 after holding teaching positions in the United States, to work as a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, and later became a Canadian citizen.
His research here was transformational.
His Toronto research group made major breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification.
The ideas and research on deep neural networks emerging from the startup company he created with two of his graduate students was so exciting Google didn’t just recruit him, they bought the whole company in 2012 for $44 million.
Hinton then divided his time between the university and Google, and in 2016 he was named a Google vice president and engineering fellow running Google’s artificial intelligence lab in Toronto. He retired from teaching at the university and retained a professor emeritus status.
He was named a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2018 for being “the driving force behind the development of a new form of artificial intelligence.”
His pioneering and influential work in A.I. was honoured in 2019 when he won the A.M. Turing Award, dubbed the Nobel Prize of computing, alongside two collaborators, Yann LeCun, of Facebook and New York University, and Yoshua Bengio, of Université de Montréal. Hinton complained on Twitter that the piece in The New York Times made it seem he was attacking his former employer, Google.
“Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly,” he said in a tweet.
Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, confirmed Hinton’s departure, praising Hinton’s “foundational breakthroughs” in A.I. and his contributions to Google.
Dean said in his statement that Google is committed to responsible A.I. development and is continually learning to understand emerging risks.