'Godfather of Deep Learning' quits Google and warns of AI dangers: 'I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it'
Geoffrey Hinton, known colloquially as the «Godfather of Deep Learning,» spent the past decade working on artificial intelligence development at Google. But in an interview with The New York Times(opens in new tab), Hinton announced that he has resigned from his position, and said he's worried about the rate of AI development and its potential for harm.
Hinton is one of the foremost researchers in the field of AI development. The Royal Society(opens in new tab), to which he was elected as a Fellow in 1998, describes him as «distinguished for his work on artificial neural nets, especially how they can be designed to learn without the aid of a human teacher,» and said that his work «may well be the start of autonomous intelligent brain-like machines.»
In 2012, he and students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever developed a system called AlexNet(opens in new tab), a «convolutional neural network» able to recognize and identify objects in images with far greater accuracy than any preceding system. Shortly after using AlexNet to win the 2012 ImageNet challenge(opens in new tab), they launched a startup company called DNN Research, which Google quickly snapped up for $44 million.
Hinton continued his AI work on a part-time basis at Google—he's also a professor at the University of Toronto(opens in new tab)—and to lead advancements in the field: In 2018, for instance, he was a co-winner of the Turing Award(opens in new tab) for «major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.»
«He was one of the researchers who introduced the back-propagation algorithm and the first to use backpropagation for learning word embeddings,» his presumably soon-to-be-deleted Google employee page(opens in new tab) says. «His other contributions to
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