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The ‘Godfather of AI’ Quits Google With a Dire Warning

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton didn’t want to speak out until he’d left the company.

One of the leading voices in artificial intelligence has quit his job at Google and issued an urgent warning about the dangers of rapidly accelerating AI technology. Geoffrey Hinton—affectionately known as the “Godfather of AI” for his trailblazing work in the field—told The New York Times that he left the company in order to speak freely about the risks posed by AI. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Hinton said. He added that new systems built by the likes of Google and OpenAI have convinced him that artificial intelligence is starting to exceed human intelligence in some areas, and said the speed of progress in the development could become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.” His intervention comes after more than 1,000 tech experts last month called for a pause in the development of more advanced AI systems owing to the technology’s “profound risks to society and humanity.”