Nobel Prize Winner Warns of AI Threat After Leaving Google
Two men who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics are pioneers in artificial intelligence (AI), and one of them is often called its “godfather.”
According to Reuters, American physicist John Hopfield and AI expert Geoffrey Hinton were awarded the prestigious prize this week. Hinton, known as the “godfather of AI,” made groundbreaking contributions in 2012 that helped shape modern neural networks. However, in 2023, he left his role at Google to join others warning about the dangers of AI.
In an interview with the New York Times last year, Hinton explained that he once believed Google was a “proper steward” of AI. That view changed when Microsoft teamed up with OpenAI to release GPT-4, the language model behind ChatGPT.
Although Hinton didn’t think AI was near its peak at the time, the 76-year-old recognized the significant shift triggered by the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, reports futurism.com.
“Most people thought it was far off. I thought it was far off,” Hinton said. “I thought it was 30 to 50 years away, or even longer.”
Before stepping away from Google and joining figures like Elon Musk in signing a letter calling for a pause on AI development, Hinton warned on CBS News that the world had reached a “pivotal moment” with AI.
“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 consistently expressed concerns that AI could soon become uncontrollable — and when it does, chaos might follow.
“Here we’re dealing with something where we have much less idea of what’s going to happen and what to do about it,” he 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.”
Hinton admitted he was surprised to win the Nobel Prize and didn’t even know he’d 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.”
