The computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, has resigned from his position at Google to be able to freely warn of the risks of an uncontrolled race between technology companies for hegemony in this field.
Hinton, one of last year’s Princess of Asturias Research Prize winners, conceived in 1972, as a doctoral student, the idea of a mathematical system based on a neural network that was capable of learning through data analysis. In 2012 he managed to make it a reality and created, together with two students, a neural network based on this concept and that, by analyzing thousands of photographs, managed to learn to identify objects such as flowers, dogs or cars. That advance laid the foundations for the creation of technologies such as ChatGPT, which in recent months have caused astonishment and fear in equal measure.
Hinton explained to The New York Times that he has decided to disassociate himself from Google, which bought the company he founded with the two students for 44 million, in order to warn without any obstacles of the danger of not regulating advances in artificial intelligence.
Their most immediate fear, the newspaper explains, is that false photos, videos and texts created with AI will soon be indistinguishable from reality: citizens “will no longer know what is true.”
For this reason, he states that “I don’t think we should go any further until [scientists] know if they can control it.”