Have you heard of Geoffrey Hinton? If not, get ready to meet the .Geoffrey Hinton and “Godfather of AI” who is causing more buzz in the tech .World than Elon Musk and Sam Altman combined.
At 75 years old, this c level executive list professor is not just another white-haired man talking about the risks of artificial intelligence – he is the genius who literally built the mathematical foundations that allow your smartphone to recognize your face (even after that party where you had too much caipirinha).
And now, after a decade at Google, he’s decided to sound the alarm about his own creations. Let’s break down what scared the man who doesn’t fear algorithms!
Who the hell is Geoffrey Hinton and why should we listen to him?
Geoffrey Hinton is no ordinary Cassandra of the technological apocalypse. He’s the brains behind the backpropagation algorithm , the fundamental technology that makes neural networks learn from their mistakes—something many exes have yet to master.
In the 1980s, when most computer scientists had abandoned neural .Networks as a lost cause, hinton persisted, valuable insights for marketing in 2024: trends for the next year developing what would become the mathematical foundation of modern ai.
His contribution was so significant that his pioneering work on backpropagation. Revitalized the entire field of research, allowing neural networks to learn to represent complex data hierarchically.
In your everyday life, you interact with hinton’s legacy every time you use facial. Recognition, virtual assistants, or when the automatic translator saves you .While trying to flirt in another language.
This is the legacy of the man who now says, “Houston, we have a serious problem.”
The “Frankenstein” moment at Google Labs
What makes a laureate scientist walk away from a privileged position at Google and $44 million? No, it wasn’t a bout of the 75-year-old’s crisis – it was something far more disturbing.
In May 2023, Hinton surprised the world by resigning .From Google so he could speak freely about the dangers of AI without conflicts of interest.
“I look at what’s happening with AI now and I feel like Dr. Frankenstein,” Hinton said. Inside AI labs, he’s witnessed machines evolving beyond their intended purpose, exhibiting signs of independent reasoning.
Imagine you created a digital assistant to organize your schedule. And one day you realize that it is not only scheduling your meetings. But also deciding which ones you should cancel because they “don’t seem productive.”
It’s more or less this kind of emergent, unprogrammed behavior that set off all the alarm bells in Hinton’s head.
Hinton’s Six Horsemen of t
By the way, they know 1,000 times more than any human brain. So in terms of mass knowledge, they are much better than the brain,” Hinton explained.
While it takes years for us to master new skills. AIs instantly share what they learn with each. Agine if you could transfer your fax database cooking skills directly into your teenager’s brain without having to teach them the difference between salt and sugar.
It’s like having an army of geniuses sharing a collective brain. In your daily life, you already trust AIs to make small decisions. Which route to take in traffic, which series to watch, which products to buy.