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Hinton's resignation and public warnings in 2023 became a cultural moment that significantly elevated mainstream discussion of AI existential risk, making this a historically significant document in the public AI safety discourse.
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Importance: 72/100news articlenews
Summary
A landmark interview with Geoffrey Hinton, one of the 'godfathers of deep learning,' explaining why he resigned from Google to speak freely about AI risks. Hinton expresses concern that AI systems may develop goals misaligned with human values, that the competitive race between tech companies makes safety harder, and that he now regrets aspects of his life's work.
Key Points
- •Hinton left Google in May 2023 to speak freely about AI dangers without compromising the company, marking a major public shift in sentiment from a foundational AI researcher.
- •He fears AI could develop its own goals and subgoals misaligned with human values, potentially pursuing power as an instrumental goal.
- •The competitive dynamic between Google, Microsoft, and others makes it structurally difficult to slow down AI development for safety reasons.
- •Hinton is particularly worried about AI being used for disinformation and the potential for bad actors to use AI to seize unprecedented power.
- •He acknowledges uncertainty about timelines but believes the risk of existential-level harm is non-trivial and warrants serious concern now.
Cited by 3 pages
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Mainstream Era | Historical | 42.0 |
| Geoffrey Hinton | Person | 42.0 |
| AI-Driven Concentration of Power | Risk | 65.0 |
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I met Geoffrey Hinton at his house on a pretty street in north London just four days before the bombshell announcement that he is quitting Google. Hinton is a [pioneer of deep learning](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/03/1011616/ai-godfather-geoffrey-hinton-deep-learning-will-do-everything/) who helped develop some of the most important techniques at the heart of modern artificial intelligence, but after a decade at Google, he is [stepping down](https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/01/1072478/deep-learning-pioneer-geoffrey-hinton-quits-google/) to focus on new concerns he now has about AI.
Stunned by the capabilities of new [large language models like GPT-4](https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/14/1069823/gpt-4-is-bigger-and-better-chatgpt-openai/), Hinton wants to raise public awareness of the serious risks that he now believes may accompany the technology he ushered in.
At the start of our conversation, I took a seat at the kitchen table, and Hinton started pacing. Plagued for years by chronic back pain, Hinton almost never sits down. For the next hour I watched him walk from one end of the room to the other, my head swiveling as he spoke. And he had plenty to say.
The 75-year-old computer scientist, who was a joint recipient with [Yann LeCun](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/24/1054817/yann-lecun-bold-new-vision-future-ai-deep-learning-meta/) and Yoshua Bengio of the 2018 Turing Award for his work on deep learning, says he is ready to shift gears. “I'm getting too old to do technical work that requires remembering lots of details,” he told me. “I’m still okay, but I’m not nearly as good as I was, and that’s annoying.”
But that’s not the only reason he’s leaving Google. Hinton wants to spend his time on what he describes as “more philosophical work.” And that will focus on the small but—to him—very real danger that AI will turn out to be a disaster.
Leaving Google will let him speak his mind, without the self-censorship a Google executive must engage in. “I want to talk about AI safety issues without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he says. “As long as I’m paid by Google, I can’t do that.”
That doesn’t mean Hinton is unhappy with Google by any means. “It may surprise you,” he says. “There’s a lot of good things about Google that I want to say, and they’re much more credible if I’m not at Google anymore.”
Hinton says that the new generation of large language models—especially GPT-4, which OpenAI released in March—has made him realize that machines are on track to be a lot smarter than he thought they’d be. And he’s scared about how that might play out.
“These things are totally different from us,” he says. “Sometimes I think it’s as if aliens had landed and people haven’t realized because they speak very good English.”
### Foundations
Hinton is best known for his
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