He’s considered one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence, but Geoffry Hinton now wants to shake the world up to the risks that can be involved.

Geoffry Hinton, one of the founders of modern AI, wants to warn the world about the risks of artificial intelligence. That’s why he’s leaving Google after a little over ten years of service. He was responsible for AI research, a topic he has been working on for decades. In 2018, this even earned him, together with two other researchers, the renowned Turing Award. For example, his work led to the creation of the now well-known ChatGPT.

Now, however, Hinton fears that AI development is progressing too quickly and wants to share those concerns. The basis of its turnaround lies in the battle between Google and that other tech giant: Microsoft. It came about after the latter had equipped its search engine Bing with AI, which set off the necessary alarm bells at Google. According to Hinton, the race between the two giants is unstoppable, but it could lead to a world with so many fake images and texts that no one can tell from reality.

It cost our jobs

It’s not just this deluge of disinformation that Hinton is now warning about. The danger of AI effectively deleting certain jobs entirely is real, he says. He even goes so far as to endanger humanity if artificial intelligence succeeds in writing and executing code on its own. Like many others, Hinton thought it would easily take another 30 to 50 years for an AI smarter than us to emerge, but he now fears the timeline could be much shorter. Skynet or HAL 9000 might be closer than we think…

Upon leaving, Hinton explained that he didn’t do it to speak out against Google and that his former employer had always been responsible about the concept of AI. For its part, Google, through Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, states that Google will continue research in a responsible manner and taking into account the risks.