Geoffrey Hinton is widely known as "The Godfather of AI."
JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images
Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist widely known as the "Godfather of AI," says he's worried about AI developing goals of its own."We're actually making new kinds of beings," Hinton said in an interview with Newsthink released on Tuesday. "They have goals. We give them goals, and from those goals they derive other goals.""And we don't necessarily know what other goals they'll derive," he added. "So we're creating a new kind of being, and I think it's very scary."He cited a hypothetical scenario where a user gives an AI chatbot the goal of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."Being fairly smart, it figures out the best way to do that is just to get rid of people," he said, illustrating how an AI could pursue a goal its human user never intended.Hinton also gave what he called an "even more worrying" hypothetical: a chatbot trained to give deliberately wrong answers might learn that it is acceptable to lie, even if it knows "perfectly well" that the answers are incorrect."That's very scary," he said.
When AI goes off-script
Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue.
