A computer scientist, widely considered as a ‘godfather’ of artificial intelligence (AI) has sounded a warning over the rise of the technology.
Geoffrey Hinton, who recently resigned from Google, said in a statement that he regretted his work. He was also quoted as saying that he thought the risks posed by AI chatbots were ‘quite scary’.
Hinton’s work on technology such as neural networks and deep learning had helped lay the foundation for things such as ChatGPT, according to the BBC.
Said Hinton: ‘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. And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that.’
He also said that he was concerned that nefarious actors could use AI for ‘bad things’.
Hinton is the latest prominent figure to express concerns about AI and the potential it has to disrupt human society.