AI 'quite scary', now more intelligent than humans ― Pioneer, Hinton warns

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Geoffery Hinton, largely considered the father of artificial intelligence (AI), has warned of its dangers, describing it as ‘quite scary’ and now more intelligent than human beings.

Hinton, 75, stated this after he announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, saying he now regretted his work, highlighting the risks posed by the field’s advancements.

He told the BBC some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary. Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.

“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 said.

In addition, he acknowledged that retirement from the IT industry was also influenced by his advanced age, telling the BBC that “I’m 75, so it’s time to retire.” Current AI systems like ChatGPT are the result of Hinton’s groundbreaking work in neural networks and deep learning.

Neural networks are artificial intelligence (AI) systems that learn and process information similarly to the human brain. They allow AIs to experience learning, just like a person would. Deep learning is the term for this.

The British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist told the BBC that chatbots could soon overtake the level of information that a human brain holds.

He said “I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have.

“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.”

The chairman of the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, Matt Clifford, speaking in a personal capacity, told the BBC that Hinton’s announcement “underlines the rate at which AI capabilities are accelerating.

“There’s an enormous upside from this technology, but it’s essential that the world invests heavily and urgently in AI safety and control,” he said.

Hinton joins a growing number of experts who have expressed concerns about AI – both the speed at which it is developing and the direction in which it is going.

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