AI godfather warns tech giants are downplaying AI risks, says only DeepMind's Demis Hassabis gets it
Hinton left Google in 2023 after more than a decade at the company. His departure was widely interpreted as his protest against its aggressive AI push. However in the podcast Hinton clarified that this narrative was not true and instead exaggerated. 'There's a wonderful story that the media loves this honest scientist who wanted to tell the truth so I had to leave Google. It's a myth,' Hinton said. 'I left Google because I was 75 and I couldn't program effectively anymore but when I left, maybe I could talk about all these risks more freely.'He added that staying at Google would have inevitably meant some level of self-censorship. 'You can't take their money and then not be influenced by what's in their own interest,' he said.During the podcast, Hinton also spoke about Demis Hassabis and praised hims as one of the few leaders who 'really wants to do something about' the risks of AI. Hassabis, who sold DeepMind to Google in 2014 now heads its AI research arm. While he talks about their development, he has also long expressed concern about the potential misuse of advanced AI systems.Earlier this year, in an interview with CNN, Hassabis admitted he is worried about AI. But he said he is less concerned about AI replacing jobs and more focused on the possibility that the technology could fall into the wrong hands.'A bad actor could repurpose those same technologies for a harmful end,' Hassabis told CNN's Anna Stewart. 'And so one big thing is how do we restrict access to these systems, powerful systems, to bad actors but enable good actors to do many, many amazing things with it?'- Ends
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