AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton calls current progress ‘frightening’

The news caused a stir in the small world of artificial intelligence. Monday, May 1, in an interview with the “New York Times”, Geoffrey Hinton announced his departure from Google, where he had held the position of chief engineer since 2013. Professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, this 75-year-old researcher is often referred to as “founding father of artificial intelligence”because his work on neural networks and deep machine learning have revolutionized the discipline since the 2000s.

Five years after being awarded with the Turing Prize equivalent of the Nobel for computer science, alongside two of his colleagues, the Frenchman Yann LeCun and the Canadian Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton no longer hides his concerns about the latest advances in artificial intelligence, and in particular large models of language (“large language models”) as OpenAI’s GPT-4 . “I left so I could talk about the dangers of AI without it having an impact on Google”had specified the researcher in a tweet after the announcement of his departure.