A Founder of Modern AI Leaves Google So He Can Warn About the Technology He Helped Create

Geoffrey Hinton, 75, whose research in the 1980s and 2012 laid the groundwork for today's programs, told The New York Times he has quit Google to speak freely about the risks. 'I console myself with the normal excuse: if I hadn't done it, somebody else would have.'

Geoffrey Hinton told The New York Times today that he has resigned from Google, where he worked for a decade, so that he can talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence without worrying about how it affects his employer. He is 75. He is also, by common agreement, one of a handful of people most responsible for the technology existing at all.

In the 1980s, Hinton championed the idea that computers could learn from examples using "neural networks," loose imitations of how the brain's cells connect — an approach most of his field considered a dead end. In 2012, he and two of his students built a network that recognized objects in photographs far better than anything before it, and the field changed direction overnight. One of those students, Ilya Sutskever, went on to co-found OpenAI. Google bought Hinton's company the next year.

What changed his mind, he said, was the last few months. He had assumed that programs like these would take thirty to fifty years to become smarter than people. "Obviously, I no longer think that." His near-term worries are the ordinary ones — a flood of fake photos and text, jobs lost — and his long-term worry is the one that sounds like science fiction: programs that write their own code, pursue their own goals, and are hard to stop. He is not certain of any of it. He thinks it's now too likely to ignore.

He was clear that he does not blame Google, which he says has behaved responsibly. His point is that the competition between Google and Microsoft has become a race nobody can stop alone, and that the people building the systems don't fully understand them. It is a version of the argument that a thousand people signed a letter about a month ago. It sounds different coming from him.