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Both of the men who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics are artificial intelligence pioneers — and one of them is considered the technology’s “godfather.”
As Reuters reports, American physicist John Hopfield and AI expert Geoffrey Hinton were awarded the coveted prize this week. Considered the “godfather of AI,” Hinton’s research in 2012 laid the groundwork for today’s neural networks — but in 2023, he quit his job at Google to join a chorus of critics sounding alarm bells about the technology.
In an interview with the New York Times last year about leaving his job as a vice president and engineering fellow at the tech giant, Hinton said he’d previously thought of Google as a “proper steward” of the powerful technology. That’s until Microsoft partnered with OpenAI to unleash the latter’s GPT-4 large language model (LLM), which powers ChatGPT, onto the masses.
Though he didn’t believe that AI was anywhere near its zenith at the time, the 76-year-old computer scientist suggested he saw the writing on the wall with the Microsoft-OpenAI deal.
“Most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off,” Hinton told the newspaper at the time. “I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away.”
“Obviously,” he continued, “I no longer think that.”
Prior to leaving Google and joining the likes of Elon Musk and other luminaries in signing an open letter calling for a pause on AI development, Hinton took to CBS News to warn that the world had reached a “pivotal moment” in terms of the technology.
“I think it’s very reasonable for people to be worrying about these issues now,” he told CBS at the time, “even though it’s not going to happen in the next year or two.”
Now a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, Hinton has made it abundantly clear in the roughly 18 months since his Google departure that he thinks that AI may escape human control at any time — and once it does, all hell may break loose.
“Here we’re dealing with something where we have much less idea of what’s going to happen and what to do about it,” the computer scientist said during a conversation with the Nobel committee. “I wish I had a sort of simple recipe that if you do this, everything’s going to be okay. But I don’t.”
Considered the leading AI “doomer” for his grim outlook on the technology he helped birth, Hinton said when speaking to the Nobel committee that he was very surprised to learn he’d won the award and had been unaware that he’d even been nominated.
“Hopefully it’ll make me more credible,” he said of winning the Nobel, “when I say these things really do understand what they’re saying.”
More on AI doomers: AI Researcher Slams OpenAI, Warns It Will Become the “Most Orwellian Company of All Time”
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