Creator of the tech behind ChatGPT leaves Google with a warning about AI

Google is awesome, right? It makes some of the best Android phones around and it is constantly unveiling new ways, aimed at making people’s lives easier. But what would happen if with even such an aim, the opposite effect is reached instead?

Meet Geoffrey Hinton. He’s 75 now and he’s spent 50 of them in the field of AI. He founded a tech company, along with two of his students: Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, which Google acquired later on, in 2012.

After the acquisition, Hinton went on to work for Google. Sutskever, however, moved on to a different project. He founded another company, which you may have heard of. It’s called OpenAI and it is the driving force behind ChatGPT and Bard — Google’s very own AI “experiment”.

But if Geoffrey Hinton — a renowned computer scientist with numerous awards and accolades, often dubbed “the Godfather of AI” — made a choice to go with Google, why is he now leaving the company in order to warn people about the dangers of AI?




Hinton goes in-depth on the topic with the New York Times. Well, as in-depth as he can go. The scientist had a meeting with Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai on the fourth of May. While we don’t know what was discussed during the meeting, we know the outcome: Hinton left Google after a decade of working with the giant.

Dr. Hinton believes that AI is close to reaching dangerous levels and at a much faster race that he would’ve predicted five years ago. His direct role in developing the tech, which now powers modern AI, has burdened him with guilt and regret about his life’s work.

That being said, the scientist isn’t blaming Google for anything. Quite the opposite, he claims that Google has been very responsible with AI. But it doesn’t take much to realize the reality of the situation:

If Microsoft hadn’t unveiled Bing AI so early, Google wouldn’t have been forced to compete through Bard in this — now existing and threatening — AI race.

While this has boosted the speed at which AI is developing, it has also introduced new dangers into the mix, like the topic of ethics, the threat of people losing their jobs and the possible spread of misinformation. As such, Dr. Hinton has decided to help prevent this through whatever means he can.