Geoffrey Hinton, one of the world’s most prominent artificial intelligence experts, has left his research role at Google LLC.

The New York Times reported Hinton’s departure from the search giant today. In an interview, the Turing Prize recipient told the Times that he has concerns about AI’s potential for misuse. Hinton (pictured) also argued that researchers should slow AI development until the risks associated with the technology are more clearly understood.

Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto, has researched AI for more than three decades. He is credited with popularizing backpropagation, a widely used method of training neural networks. The 1986 paper in which Hinton and two colleagues detailed their backpropagation approach is one of more than 200 that he has authored or co-authored over his academic career.

In 2012, another paper co-authored by Hinton helped spark the current industry interest surrounding AI. Hinton and two students, Ilya Sutskever and Krizhevsky, developed an AI model that proved far more adept at image recognition tasks than earlier algorithms. Sutskever went on to become the chief scientist of OpenAI LLP, while Krizhevsky is a professor at the University of Toronto.

For his contributions to deep learning, Hinton received the 2018 Turning Prize. He shared the prize, which is considered the most important award in computer science, with fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. 

For the past decade, Hinton has split his time between the University of Toronto and Google. Hinton told the Times that he notified the search giant of his intent to resign last month. 

Until last year, Hinton detailed, Google acted as a “proper steward” of its internally developed AI technology. Since then, the search giant and Microsoft Corp. have both introduced advanced chatbots powered by large language models. Hinton expressed concerns that the competition between the two companies in the AI market may prove “impossible to stop.”

“We remain committed to a responsible approach to A.I,” Google chief scientist Jeff Dean said in a statement. “We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”

In the Times interview, Hinton flagged multiple risks that could emerge from the broad availability of advanced neural networks. 

Hinton cautioned that generative AI could be used to flood the internet with large amounts of false photos, videos and text. He believes the phenomenon may lead to a situation where users will “not be able to know what is true anymore.” Hinton also expressed concerns about AI’s long-term impact on the job market.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” Hinton told the Times. “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.”

Hinton went on to say that he believes researchers should slow AI development until they develop a method of controlling the technology. Additionally, he suggested “some sort of global regulation” may be necessary to limit the AI competition between tech giants such as Google and Microsoft. 

Last month, a group of prominent tech executives and researchers made similar arguments in a widely publicized open letter. The letter called on AI labs such as OpenAI to pause the development of neural networks more advanced than GPT-4 for at least six months. The signatories included Yoshua Bengio, one of the two AI researchers with whom Hinton shared the 2018 Turing Prize. 

Photo: University of Toronto