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The backbone of the technology behind advanced artificial intelligence programs such as Google's Bard and OpenAI's ChatGPT was created in 2012 by Geoffrey Hinton and two graduate students, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky. Their neural network was designed to analyze photographs and teach itself to identify things such as cars and animals.
Hinton's company was quickly noticed by Google, which acquired it for $44 billion, and started Hinton's decade-long career at the tech giant.
Hinton, who has been referred to as the "Godfather of AI," has watched as the technology he created over ten years ago has grown more and more powerful.
Now, Hinton regrets his role in creating artificial intelligence systems and has quit his job at Google to speak out against the dangers of AI.
"I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have," Dr. Hinton told the New York Times.
Hinton said he is worried about the harm that generative AI can cause. The technology is already capable of creating fake photographs and videos, while OpenAI's ChatGPT has been able to pass exams for law and medical schools. It has also been known to go off the rails and threaten users.
Hinton is worried about what would happen if people with bad intentions harnessed the technology to spread false information. He warned that in the near future, people will "not be able to know what is true anymore."
"It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," Dr. Hinton said.
Hinton pointed out the quick pace of advancement over the past five years and is worried that it is only a matter of time before AI becomes more intelligent than humans.
"The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that," Hinton explained. "But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that."