'Sometimes I think it's as if aliens have landed and people haven't realised because they speak very good English," said Geoffrey Hinton, the 'godfather of AI' (Artificial Intelligence), who resigned from Google and now fears his godchildren will become "things more intelligent than us, taking control".
And 1,100 people in the business, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, and engineers at Amazon, DeepMind, Google, Meta and Microsoft, signed an open letter in March calling for a six-month time-out in the development of the most powerful AI systems (anything "more powerful than GPT-4").
There's a media-feeding frenzy about AI at the moment, and every working journalist is required to have an opinion on it. I turned to the task with some reluctance.
