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Geoffrey Hinton, a researcher dubbed "the godfather of AI" for his enormous contributions to the discipline, has resigned from his position at Google unhappy with the direction artificial intelligence tools are taking.
In an interview with the New York Times, Hinton warns that it will be difficult to prevent the tools he helped create over the past few decades from being used for harmful purposes. "I console myself with the usual excuse: if I hadn't done it, someone else would have done it," he explains in the interview.
Hinton, who won the prestigious Turing Award in 2018 for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, is the developer of many of the techniques that allow the creation of neural networks – a computational model that simulates the behavior of neurons in living beings – capable of distinguishing specific objects.
His work has made it possible for computers in recent decades to be able to understand with a high level of confidence what happens or what elements are in a given image or in an audio fragment, a task that until not long ago was considered almost impossible.
In artificial intelligence, these techniques developed by Hinton are known as "deep learning" techniques and allow algorithms to be trained to detect a cat or dog in an image, for example, using hundreds of thousands of examples. After being exposed to all these images, the system itself ends up inferring the properties that define the essence of the animal in question and is able to detect them in new photographs, even if it has not seen them before.
It is a key advance for modern artificial intelligence tools, including those known as generative artificial intelligences, capable of creating images or texts from natural language descriptions.
The researcher joined Google in 2013 after the web giant bought DNNresearch, which Hinton founded with some of his students at the University of Toronto.
Until now, the researcher was happy with the progress and the way Google was developing its AI tools but says that something changed after the announcement of ChatGPT by OpenAI at the end of last year.
In a few months, the race to create increasingly advanced artificial intelligence tools has intensified and Hinton has decided to leave the company to talk about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence without affecting the company, which considers that it is acting "responsibly".
Hinton also believes that we are very close to creating generalist artificial intelligences much smarter than a human being, a scenario that until recently he considered to be quite far away.
His voice joins that of other academics and researchers who are beginning to be concerned about the speed with which artificial intelligence tools are being refined and the fierce competition that has arisen among large technology companies to have increasingly complex applications with a great social impact.
Last March, several of them published an open letter asking that the development in artificial intelligence be stopped for at least six months to bring to agree on common guidelines or a regulatory framework that allows progress with less risks for the population.
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