Google’s Top AI Engineer Resigns, His Reason Scares the World

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Geoffrey Hinton, a VP and engineer at Google has resigned after working with the company for 10 years. He was the brain behind some of the most important techniques of modern-day artificial intelligence at Google. A report from New York Times today says that he is leaving the company.

To explain further, Hinton said he was leaving the company due to fears. He said he has fears about the technology he helped develop. According to him, resigning will help him speak about it openly. He also stated that he regrets that part of his working life.

On Wednesday, Hinton will be speaking to MIT Tecnology Review at EmTech Digital. This will be his first interview after his resignation. In 2018, he won the Nobel Prize in computing together with Ann Lecun and Yoshua Bengio.

According to Lecun who is a chief AI Scientist at Meta, Geoff has contributed tremendously to AI. “He hadn’t told me that he was planning to leave, but I’m not surprised, he added.

In 2013, Google acquired Geoff’s startup company DNNresearch. Since then, the 75-year-old computer scientist has worked for both University of Toronto and Google. Hinton created his startup from his research group. This research group was into advanced machine learning for image recognition. Thanks to this feature searching for images on Google became a lot easier.

Could Google AI Have Some Connections with the US Military?

For some time now, Hinton has been raising concerns about the use of AI, especially for military purposes. He also explained why he spent most of his time in Canada. He emphasized that obtaining funding that is not tied to the US military is difficult in the US. However, that is not the case in Canada, and that explains why he spent most of his life in Canada. Concerning his resignation, Google chief scientist expressed his experience in working with Hinton. “Geoff has made foundational breakthroughs in AI, and we appreciate his decade of contributions at Google. I’ve deeply enjoyed our many conversations over the years. I’ll miss him, and I wish him well,” he said.

Dean also added that Google is one of the first companies to publish AI principles. Hence the company will always commit to approaching AI responsibly. “We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly,” he added.

In the 1980s, Hinton and his two colleagues proposed an algorithm called Backpropagation. Hence, Backpropagation is what he is mostly known for. This Backpropagation allows the computer to learn and improve at tasks. Today, this is the main method that powers almost all machine learning technologies. Backpropagation simply works by adjusting the connections between different parts of the computer brain until it gets the right answer. It does this over and over again until the computer is able to learn the task assigned to it.

Hinton believed that Backpropagation works just like how the human brain works in learning. He even went further in trying to improve it. It however turned out that there was no other way to make it better.

AI and Machine Learning is Available Today Mostly Because of Google Engineer

In a statement, a professor at the University of Montreal and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms said Hinton deserves great credit for making machine learning possible today. “I assume this also makes him feel a particularly strong sense of responsibility in alerting the public about potential risks of the ensuing advances in AI,” he added.

This news has caused stare around the world. What are we supposed to be scared of? Is Google taking advantage of Machine Learning to create something dangerous? How about the mention of the US Military? These are some of the questions people are asking. Surely, most of these people can get their answers during his interview.

At his interview with MIT Technology Review, Hinton will surely speak more about the main reason behind his resignation. Whatever his reason may be, the issues surrounding his Backpropagation technology in relation to connections with the US military does not sound good. There is definitely something scary inside the wardrobe. The interview is just some few days away, we will follow the news and update our readers with all the details that emerge from his interview.