(Washington) Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence (AI) has warned of its dangers by leaving his position at the giant Google.
“I left so I could talk about the dangers of AI without worrying about any impact on Google,” Hinton tweeted after the New York Times announced his departure.
Advances in this sector entail “ deep risks for society and humanity ”, believes in the American newspaper Mr. Hinton, who has created a foundation dedicated to AI systems.
“ Look at where we were five years ago and the current situation ”, he continues, judging “ frightening ” the prospects for the future by making projections on the basis of the progress of recent years.
According to him, “ it is difficult to see how to prevent bad actors from using it for bad things ”.
The rapid deployment of an increasingly “ general ” artificial intelligence (AI), endowed with human cognitive capacities and therefore likely to disrupt many professions, was symbolized by the launch in March by OpenAI of GPT-4, a new, more powerful version of the natural language model that powers ChatGPT.
This generative AI interface has been used by millions of people for a few months to write essays, poems or even lines of computer code.
This launch also spurred competition in this area.
Mr. Hinton also warns, in The New York Times, about misinformation that could be generated by AI.
The expert informed Google of his resignation last month, according to the newspaper.
In the tweet confirming his departure he refutes any desire to criticize the technology giant for this decision. “ Google has behaved very responsibly ”, he writes.
In March, billionaire Elon Musk — one of the founders of OpenAI, whose board he later left — and hundreds of global experts called for a six-month hiatus from research into AIs more powerful than GPT- 4, referring to “ major risks for humanity ”.
Geoffrey Hinton was not one of the signatories, but he told the New York Times that scientists should not ramp up these AIs “until they know if they are able to control them”.
In 2019, Mr. Hinton had received, along with two other specialists in artificial intelligence, the Turing Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel for computer scientists.
