The godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton has just won the 2024 Noble Prize for physics. He was up till recently working at Google, but shockingly has left them. Suffice it to say, Google was surprised.
Stunned by the capabilities of new large language models like GPT-4, Hinton wants to raise awareness of the serious risks that he now believes may accompany the technology he ushered in. He also has issued a dooms day warning. He advises that advanced systems could take over the world. Talk about one changing their mind!
He contends that we are at a crossroads, suggesting that we devote more resources to the oversight and control of technology. He says that AI supposedly “understands” their doing? (I do not know in what context it “understands” but so he says.) He also issues a Dooms Day warning advanced systems could take over the world and the danger that AI poses.
One interesting thing he indicates is that, as their name suggests, large language models are made from massive neural networks with vast numbers of connections. But they are tiny compared with the human brain. “Our brains have 100 trillion connections,” says Hinton. “Large language models have up to half a trillion, a trillion at most. Yet GPT-4 knows hundreds of times more than any one person does. So maybe it’s got a much better learning algorithm than us.” (Its called a database. But a database is not “intelligence” as we know it.)
So the net analysis of this all is, slow progress yes, but no real AI YET.