Geoffrey Hinton’s artificial intelligence (A.I.) research has helped enable the rise of technologies that were once the stuff of sci-fi flicks, from facial recognition to chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. The British-Canadian computer scientist earned the title “the godfather of A.I.” by dedicating his career to the study of neural networks—complex computer models whose layered structures mimic the human brain—decades before the technology went mainstream. But Hinton resigned from a position he held at Google for over a decade last month, telling the New York Times he made the decision so he could freely discuss “the dangers of A.I.” without considering how it might impact the company.
Since then, he has been on a Paul Revere–esque campaign to warn about the existential risk to humanity that A.I. poses in a series of interviews which have even garnered the attention of the rapper Snoop Dogg, who recently referenced Hinton's claim that A.I. is “not safe.” “Snoop gets it,” Hinton told Wired Monday.
