A man widely seen as the godfather of artificial intelligence, AI, has quit his job, warning about the growing dangers from developments in the field. Jeffrey Hinton, 75, announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, saying he now regretted his work. Dr. Hinton also accepted that his age had played into his decision to leave the tech giant, telling, I'm 75, so it's time to retire. Dr. Hinton's pioneering research on neural networks and deep learning has paved the way for current AI systems like chat GPT. In artificial intelligence, neural networks are systems that are similar to the human brain in the way they learn and process information. They enable AI's to learn from experience, as a person would. This is called deep learning. The British Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist told that chatbots could soon overtake the level of information that a human brain holds. Right now, what we're seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it's not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning, he said. And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that. In the New York Times article, Dr. Hinton referred to bad actors, who would try to use AI for bad things. When asked to elaborate on this, he replied, this is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a nightmare scenario. You can imagine, for example, some bad actor like Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to give robots the ability to create their own subgoals. The scientist warned that this eventually might create subgoals like, I need to get more power. He added, I've come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we're developing is very different from the intelligence we have. Their biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world. And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it's as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learned something, everybody automatically knew it. And that's how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person. Matt Clifford, the chairman of the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency, speaking in a personal capacity, told Hat Doctor Hinton's announcement, underlines the rate at which AI capabilities are accelerating. There's an enormous upside from this technology, but it's essential that the world invests heavily and urgently in AI safety and control, he said. Doctor Hinton joins a growing number of experts who have expressed concerns about AI, both the speed at which it is developing and the direction in which it is going. We need to take a step back. In March, an open letter, co-signed by dozens of people in the AI field, including the tech billionaire Elon Musk, called for a pause on all developments more advanced than the current version of AI chatbot chat GPT so robust safety measures could be designed and implemented. Yoshua Benjo, another so-called godfather of AI, who along with Doctor Hinton and Jan LeCun won the 2018 Turing Award for their work on deep learning, also signed the letter. Mr. Benjo wrote that it was because of the unexpected acceleration in AI systems that we need to take a step back. But Doctor Hinton told that, in the shorter term, he thought AI would deliver many more benefits than risks. So I don't think we should stop developing this stuff, he added. He also said that international competition would mean that a pause would be difficult. Even if everybody in the US stopped developing it, China would just get a big lead, he said. Doctor Hinton also said he was an expert on the science, not policy, and that it was the responsibility of government to ensure AI was developed, with a lot of thought into how to stop it going rogue. Responsible approach Doctor Hinton stressed that he did not want to criticize Google and that the tech giant had been, very responsible. I actually want to say some good things about Google, and they're more credible if I don't work for Google. In a statement, Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean said, we remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We're continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly. It is important to remember that AI chatbots are just one aspect of artificial intelligence, even if they are the most popular right now. AI is behind the algorithms that dictate what video streaming platforms decide you should watch next. It can be used in recruitment to filter job applications, by insurers to calculate premiums, it can diagnose medical conditions, although human doctors still get the final say. What we are seeing now though is the rise of AGI, artificial general intelligence, which can be trained to do a number of things within a remit. So for example, chat GPT can only offer text answers to a query, but the possibilities within that, as we are seeing, are endless. But the pace of AI acceleration has surprised even its creators. It has evolved dramatically since Dr. Hinton built a pioneering image analysis neural network in 2012. Even Google Boss Sundar Pachai said in a recent interview that even he did not fully understand everything that its AI chatbot, BART, did. Make no mistake, we are on a speeding train right now, and the concern is that one day it will start building its own tracks.