“we’re at this very very special point in history where in a relatively short time everything might totally change at a change of a scale we’ve never seen before.”
Geoffrey Hinton, whose work shaped modern artificial intelligence, says companies are moving too fast without enough focus on safety. Brook Silva-Braga introduced us to Hinton in 2023 and recently caught up with him.
last December Jeffrey Hinton was awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in machine learning a major turning point on the road to artificial intelligence brook Silva Braga introduced us to this leading figure in AI back in 2023 and recently went back to visit him good morning Brooke good morning when we first met Hinton the world had just been introduced to OpenAI’s chat GPT triggering a kind of AI arms race hundreds of billions have been spent on AI in just the last two years hinton entered the field decades before it was cool and now retired from Google has a unique independent perspective on how he got here and where we’re headed this is a Nobel Prize last year Jeffrey Hinton for most of his life an outcast professor was awoken by a call in the middle of the night he was getting the Nobel Prize people dream of winning these things and when you do win it does it feel like you thought it might i never dreamt about winning one for physics so I don’t know i dreamt about winning one for figuring out how the brain works but I didn’t figure out how the brain works but I want one anyway that’s because Hinton’s attempt to model the brain instead helped change the world in 1986 he proposed using a neural network to predict the next word in a sequence the foundational concept that today’s large language models it’s an expert at everything have built upon you believe then that we would get here yes but not not this soon cuz that was 40 years yeah i didn’t think we get here in only 40 years but 10 years ago I didn’t believe we get here yeah it happened fast yeah that speed Hinton says means education and medicine will soon be transformed climate change could be solved but mostly the rapid progress really worries him the best way to understand it emotionally is we’re like somebody who has this really cute tiger cup it’s just such a cute tiger cup unless you can be very sure that it’s not going to want to kill you when it’s grown up you should worry i’m kind of glad I’m 77 hinton predicts AI will make authoritarians more oppressive and hackers more effective he now spreads his money across three banks the exact odds of an AI apocalypse are unknowable he says but hazards this guess a 10 to 20% risk AI will take over from humans people haven’t got it yet people haven’t understood what’s coming i don’t think there’s a way of stopping it take control if it wants to the issue is can we design it in such a way that it never wants to take control that it’s always benevolent those concerns have long been shared by other AI leaders google CEO Sundar Pachai it can be very harmful if deployed wrongly ex AI’s Elon Musk who continues to call for regulation it has the potential of civilizational destruction sam Alman seen here before he became Open AI’s CEO i think AI will probably like most likely sort of lead to the end of the world but now as these companies race each other and compete with China Hinton worries they’re foolishly selfishly putting all of humanity at risk if you look what the big companies are doing right now they’re lobbying to get less AI regulation there’s hardly any regulation as it is but they want less um because they want short-term profits taking a stand against the establishment has been the hallmark of Hinton’s life when American AI funding required partnering with the Defense Department he moved to Canada when neural networks were laughed at as unworkable he worked on them for a few decades more is that a certain thing in a person yeah you have to be contrarian you have to have a deep belief that everybody else could be doing things wrong and you could figure out how to do them right do any idea where that came from my my family partly my father was like that that’s him there hinton’s legendary family tree includes not just his father the prominent entomologist but further back George Bool whose algebra innovations paved the way for computing and George Everest the surveyor who found the height of the world’s tallest peak then had it named after him so it hit there hinton’s inheritance was a curious mechanic’s mind were you always interested in this kind of stuff the way things work and how to fix them absolutely i loved it when one of our cameras fell damaging a lens filter Hinton wanted to fix it but this kind of tinkering was this desire important to your work or is this just a hobby no this is a similar thing when I would make neural net models on the computer I would then tinker with them for a long time to find out how they behaved and a lot of people didn’t do much of that but I loved tinkering with them okay i remember with Ilia we used to watch it learning and we would have bets for like 25 cents on who could predict the new score best ilia Suskver Hinton’s most famous protetéé went on to be chief scientist at OpenAI to just set up a large neural network which is a large digital brain in 2023 he was part of the group that pushed out CEO Sam Alman reportedly because they didn’t trust that Alman was prioritizing safety i was quite proud of him for firing Sam Alman even though it was very naive naive Hinton says because Open AI employees were about to get millions of dollars that would be jeopardized by Altman’s departure altman returned Syskver left hinton criticizes his former colleagues at Google more reluctantly but says they’re falling short too were you disappointed when Google went back on its promise not to support military uses of AI very disappointed but it’s part of a pattern Hinton says adding Meta and XAI to the list of companies racing faster than they should for example the fraction of their computer time they spend on safety research should be a significant fraction like a third right now it’s much much less hinton now on the AI sidelines says government regulation is needed but doesn’t expect it soon i’m curious if just in your normal day-to-day life you despair you fear for the future and assume it won’t be so good i don’t despair but mainly because even I find it very hard to take it seriously ah it’s very hard to get your head around the fact that we’re at this very very special point in history where in a relatively short time everything might totally change at a change of a scale we’ve never seen before um it’s hard to absorb that emotionally we asked the AI labs mentioned in the piece how much of their compute is used for safety research none of them gave us a specific number but all have said safety is important and they support regulation in general but they’ve mostly opposed regulations that have come up before lawmakers so far did he indicate which sector the breach might technically happen well well like he says he’s already worried about banks he thinks banks are going to be a target he has spread his money across different banks oh wow all right it’s a little scary Brooke but great reporting thank you so much did you get the lens fixed on the camera the lens is fixed all right Nobel Prize winner in action