After retiring from Google so he could speak more freely, so-called Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton plans to outline his concerns Wednesday at a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He's already voiced regrets about his work and doubt about humanity's survival if machines get smarter than people.
There are plenty of signs that governments are listening. The White House has called in the CEOs of Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to meet Thursday with Vice President Kamala Harris in what's being described by officials as a frank discussion on how to mitigate both the near-term and long-term risks of their technology. European lawmakers are also accelerating negotiations to pass sweeping new AI rules.
“It’s a privilege that he gets to jump from the realities of the propagation of discrimination now, the propagation of hate language, the toxicity and nonconsensual pornography of women, all of these issues that are actively harming people who are marginalized in tech,” said Mitchell, who was also forced out of Google in the aftermath of Gebru's departure. “He’s skipping over all of those things to worry about something farther off.
But those concerns have grown recently, leading Bengio to join other computer scientists and tech business leaders like Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in calling for a six-month pause on developing AI systems more powerful than OpenAI's latest model, GPT-4. Where researchers are less likely to agree is on how current AI language systems — which have many limitations, including a tendency to fabricate information — will actually get smarter than humans.