LONDON (Reuters) – Artificial intelligence pioneer Jeffrey Hinton said in an interview with Reuters on Friday that artificial intelligence could pose a “more immediate” threat to humanity than climate change. .
Jeffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the “Godfathers of AI,” recently announced he was retiring from Alphabet (GOOGL.O) after 10 years. Employer.
Hinton’s work is considered essential to the development of modern AI systems. In 1986, he co-authored “Learning Representations by Backpropagation Errors”, a landmark paper in the development of neural networks underlying AI technology. In 2018, he received a Turing Award in recognition of his research breakthroughs.
However, he is now one of a growing number of technology leaders who publicly endorse concerns about the potential threat posed by AI if machines achieve greater intelligence than humans and take over the planet. It is
“I don’t want to devalue climate change. I don’t want to say, ‘Don’t worry about climate change.’ That’s also a big risk,” Hinton said. “But I think this could be more urgent.”
He added: “When it comes to climate change, it’s very easy to recommend what to do. Just stop burning carbon. not.”
Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI fired the first pistol of its technological arms race in November when it released its AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT to the public. It quickly became the fastest growing app in history, reaching his 100 million monthly users in two months.
In April, Twitter CEO Elon Musk joined thousands of people signing an open letter calling for a six-month halt to development of a system more powerful than the recently launched GPT-4 of OpenAI. rice field.
Signatories include Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, and fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.
Hinton shared the signatories’ concerns that AI could threaten human survival, but did not agree to a research moratorium.
“It’s just unrealistic,” he said. “I am in the camp that thinks this is an existential risk. We need to put resources into it.”
In the European Union, a panel of lawmakers responded to a Musk-backed letter to U.S. President Joe Biden at a world summit on the future directions of technology with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. asked to hold
Last week, the committee agreed to a set of groundbreaking proposals aimed at generative AI. This forces companies like OpenAI to disclose copyrighted material used to train their models.
Meanwhile, Biden met at the White House with a number of AI company leaders, including Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, about the need for companies to be more transparent about their systems. He promised to hold frank and constructive discussions.
“Technology leaders understand it best, and politicians need to get involved,” Hinton said. “We all have to think about it because it affects us all.”
Reporting by Martin Coulter, Editing by Deepa Babington
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