Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google to warn about AI
Hinton, 75, said he was also retiring, but that a part of him now regretted his life's work and that the danger from AI now looked 'serious and fairly close.'
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Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose work on backpropagation and neural networks in the 1980s helped found the deep learning approach behind the current generation of AI models, announced he had resigned from Google after roughly a decade at the company. Hinton, 75, said the decision was partly ordinary retirement, but that he had also left so he could speak freely about the risks of the technology he had spent his career developing — concerns he said he did not want to raise while still a Google employee, out of a sense of obligation to speak carefully as a representative of the company.
Hinton said the rapid recent progress of large language models had changed his own timeline for when serious risks might materialise. “I used to think it was a long way off,” he said of the danger posed by AI systems seeking greater control, “but I now think it’s serious and fairly close.” He described being uncertain, and troubled, about whether to regret the direction his life’s work had taken, telling interviewers that current AI capability had arrived faster than he had expected and that he could not see an easy way to prevent bad actors from using the technology for harmful ends.
His resignation, and the extensive press coverage that followed — including a lengthy New York Times interview published the same day — made Hinton one of the most prominent AI researchers to publicly voice existential-risk concerns, lending unusual credibility to arguments that had previously come mostly from outside the field’s most decorated practitioners. He continued making the case in public appearances in the weeks after, including a live interview at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference. Along with fellow deep-learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, Hinton became one of the most cited voices in the debate over AI risk that intensified through 2023, including later signing statements alongside Sam Altman and other lab leaders warning of AI’s potential to pose risks on the scale of pandemics and nuclear war.