'Godfather Of AI' Pushes Back On New York Times Characterization Of His Google Exit

Geoffery Hinton pushed back on Tuesday at the claims he quit his job so he could publicly criticize the company he used to work for, Google.

What Happened: Hinton is known as “The Godfather of AI." While at Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG GOOGL Google he did pioneering work on deep learning and neural networks which helped lay the foundation for most AI tech.

He quit his job at the tech giant so he could freely discuss the dangers of AI, not to criticize the company, he clarified on Twitter.

Read Also: AI Godfather Geoffrey Hinton Quits Google: 'Hard To See How You Can Prevent The Bad Actors' From Using Tech Behind ChatGPT

“In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google,” Hinton told his followers. “Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.”

Hinton was raising concerns about an influx of AI-produced photos, videos and text on the internet that would increase mistrust and misuse.

Hinton warned that AI tools such as Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT will disrupt industries and the job market.

A lifelong AI researcher with a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, Hinton had worked at Google since 2013, where he also designed machine learning algorithms and helped develop an efficient learning procedure that finds complex structures in large, high-dimensional datasets, aiming to show how the brain learns to see.

Why It Matters: His warnings are not going unheard.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, along with OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will meet Vice President Kamala Harris and other Biden administration officials to discuss key artificial intelligence issues, Reuters reported. This is something Elon Musk, who is also calling foul on artificial intelligence, discussed last week with Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is the Senate Majority Leader.

Read Next: Rise Of The Machines? IBM Eyes Replacing 7,800 'Non-Customer-Facing' Jobs With AI

Photos: Shutterstock; Eviatar Bach via Wikimedia Commons