🎬 AI Godfathers

THE BIG IDEA
Nobel prize goes to AI ‘godfather’ who’s worried about his creation

Imagine if Dr. Frankenstein got a gold medal for pulling the lever on his eight-foot friend. That might be how machine-learning guru Geoffrey Hinton felt on Tuesday when he was named a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for work starting in the 1980s on the technology that he now wants to see less of.

“I’m flabbergasted,” he told the Nobel committee over the phone from a “cheap hotel” in California, when he was told he had won, adding that he’d probably cancel an MRI appointment he had scheduled for later in the day. Hinton shares the accolade and $1 million prize with fellow tech pioneer John Hopfield, whose work underpinned Hinton’s research on neural networks, which in turn props up artificial intelligence like ChatGPT.

But…both scientists have raised the alarm on AI:

• Hinton, who’s often called the godfather of AI, quit Google last spring after 10+ years, saying he partly regretted his life’s work and urging Big Tech to slow down and assess AI risks. He said on Tuesday that he still worries about “systems more intelligent than us potentially taking over control in the future.”

• Hopfield signed early petitions calling for more regulation and has compared AI to viruses or nuclear power because of the massive potential to help or hurt civilization.

• In one of his petitions, Hopfield called for AI companies to pause the development of generative AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4.

But just a day later, AI claimed another victory as the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was jointly awarded to David Baker, John Jumper, and Demis Hassabis for their work in using AI to predict protein structures.

Hinton still uses GPT-4: He asks his ‘godson’ everything. He said, “I don’t totally trust it because it can hallucinate, but it’s a not-very-good expert on almost everything. And that’s very useful.” -TD.

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