Artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Hopfield on Tuesday for their discoveries related to “machine learning”, recently stood out for his warnings about this technology.
Geoffrey Hinton. PHOTO You Tube capture
Last spring, when he was asked by journalists from an American television station about “the risks of artificial intelligence destroying humanity”the Canadian-British researcher did not hide his concern, according to AFP; quoted by Agerpres.
“It’s not unimaginable” replied Geoffrey Hinton.
The septuagenarian researcher left the Google group, where he had worked for decades, a few weeks later to find media companies looking for platforms to warn the public about the dangers of AI.
Who is Geoffrey Hinton
(now aged 76), was born in London, and grew up in Bristol, a city in south-west England, before studying in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Cambridge University.
His father was a member of the Royal Society, the prestigious association of British scientists.
Geoffrey Hinton often described his childhood as a stressful existence, trying to live up to the standards of an illustrious family of renowned researchers.
His whole life was marked by depression, a subject he confessed to in the Canadian magazine Toronto Life, and he often tried to find an escape in work.
After the loss of his second wife, who died of cancer in the early 1990s, shortly after they had adopted two children, the researcher became a single father.
He married for the third time in 1997, but that wife also died of cancer in 2018.
“I find it hard to imagine how a mother who has several children can continue her university career. I had made a habit of spending my time reflecting on various ideas. But with the children on the ground floor, this is simply mandatorybil,” he revealed to Toronto Life magazine.
The risk of “control”, one of the reasons why Hinton appeared “concerned”
A self-proclaimed socialist, Geoffrey Hinton worked for several American universities starting in the late 1970s, but decided to reject funding from the US military, the main funder of his research field.
In 1987, he moved permanently to Toronto after obtaining funding from the Canadian Government for his work on neural networks.
He remained a marginal university professor for many years, but his ideas eventually reached the research community he frequented.
A turning point in his career was in 2013. Recruited by Google, he became a central figure in this field of activity in Silicon Valley, while some of his students were employed by competing companies.
Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, described the years spent in the labs with Geoffrey Hinton as “essential” to his career.
The two researchers became, in parallel, major personalities of the emerging criticisms aimed at AI.
“To work harder to think about how they might try to take over”
Ilya Sutskever also left OpenAI a year after Geoffrey Hinton left Google.
“Before artificial intelligences become smarter than us, I think those who develop them should be encouraged to work harder to think about how they might try to take overl,” Hinton told a group of high-tech industrialists in June 2023.
More worried than proud of his research, until his statements after winning the Nobel Prize – made from a “cheap Californian hotel” -, Geoffrey Hinton sent a message of caution to the whole world on Tuesday.
“Under the same circumstances, I would do the same thing again. But I’m worried that a major consequence of all this could be that AI models become smarter than us and take over.”he stated.
