AI 'Godfather' Gets Calls From Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders, White House — But Warns His Advice May Be Unpopular

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, aka "Godfather of AI" was in the news recently as he quit Alphabet, Inc's Google. It appears that he has got his next assignment in hand.

What Happened: Hinton, aged 75 years, received requests for help from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and the White House, and he has decided to respond to them, the London-born scientist reportedly told Guardian.

But he will not be filling them with something they would like/want to hear, the computer scientist cum psychologist said.

Identifying himself as a socialist, Hinton said he is against private ownership of media and the means of computation.

"If you view what Google is doing in the context of a capitalist system, it's behaving as responsibly as you could expect it to do. But that doesn't mean it's trying to maximize utility for all people: it's legally obliged to maximize utility for its shareholders, and that's a very different thing," the scientist said.

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Not A Policy Guy: Hinton quit Google out of the drive to warn the world about the risk of digital intelligence. He clarified that he is not a policy guy but one who "suddenly became aware there's a danger of something really bad happening."

The scientist wished there was an easy fix. "‘Just stop burning carbon, and you'll be OK.' But I can't see a simple solution like that," he said.

Hinton was the recipient of the Turing Award in 2018 for his work on deep learning, a technology that drives the AI revolution.  Over the past year, he has come to realize that computer models are much better than the brain.

Musk is among the skeptic crowd that has been discussing the perils of AI, although he recently launched X.AI dedicated to AI research.

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