A leading figure in artificial intelligence (AI) development shared his thoughts on the rise of ChatGPT—saying that the technology represents the next industrial revolution.
Key Details
- Geoffrey Hinton is known as the godfather of AI and splits his time mentoring AI programmers at Google and teaching at the University of Toronto.
- He was interviewed for March 25’s episode of CBS Saturday Morning, telling reporter Brook Silva-Braga that he is proud that his “nonsense” ideas are finally coming to fruition.
- Hinton notes that AI does present dangers, notably that it will give a small handful of governments and corporations incredible technological power.
- Elon Musk tweeted that Hinton’s discussion was a “great interview on AI.”
Why It’s Important
OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, and sparked four months of rapidly proliferating technological advancement with its chatbot technology sparking the AI arms race and forcing companies like Google and Baidu to rush out their own variants on the technology into the market. In that short time, ChatGPT has grown to more than 100 million subscribers, was implemented into Bing’s search engine, and released an updated version, GPT-4.
“Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general-purpose AI. And now I think it may be 20 years or less,” says Hinton.
Rapid proliferation has created concerns for the future of technology. Users have raised alarms that the technology is prone to political biases, cites sources incorrectly, responds to questions with unhinged answers, and could potentially spread purposeful disinformation and destroy job markets.
The Problem
Hinton, who pioneered the idea that AI could mimic human thought patterns rather than being merely programmed, which has become the forefront of AI research as modern AIs are trained on large datasets, agrees.
He told CBS News that it is not out of the question for AI to destroy humanity effectively. He says that AI researchers are doing their best to assess the impact AI will have on the world and believes it holds the potential to make jobs faster and easier.
“I think it’s very reasonable for people to be worrying about these issues now, even though it’s not going to happen in the next year or two. People should be thinking about those issues,” says Hinton.
