Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and can now speak freely about his AI concern
theverge.com
theverge.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771104 (60 points, 80 comments)
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
It's questionable to place that whole development in 2012, as much as the combination of accumulated learnings and introduction of Dropout regularization pushed benchmarks and grabbed attention and economical investment. Omitted from Ricker / the Verge, which instead discusses the foundational work without a specific timepoint and includes also at least the work by the other two Turing prize winners.
Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than a decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I.
Hinton was 'one of the most respected voices in the field' for decades before taking employment at Google. This excerpt also contains the first of several insinuations that would seem be the reason for Hinton's rebuttal which has been pointed out at https://twitter.com/geoffreyhinton/status/165299357072121037... Note in particular:
Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.
But I must admit, in a rereading with some emphasis on analysis, I actually see far fewer strictly, explicitly wrong statements than I had impression of at first. I still feel it misuses loaded language and arrangement to paint a picture of accusations and degrees of angst and doom which I have bit of a hard time believing. So maybe my preference for Ricker's version is mainly due to that style difference. It does make one of the overinterpretations I'd argue Metz invites, in
According to the NYT interview, Hinton was happy with Google’s stewardship of the technology until Microsoft launched the new OpenAI-infused Bing, challenging Google’s core business and sparking a “code red” response inside the search giant. Such fierce competition might be impossible to stop, Hinton says, resulting in a world with so much fake imagery and text that nobody will be able to tell “what is true anymore.”
But on the other hand it has been amended to include Hinton's clarifying statement right after that, which is more than could be said for the NYT piece.
I think that's a good way to do it: post the original article, then include additional relevant information in the thread. This is better than rewarding articles that are mostly copying someone else's work.
I'm not going to try to convince you to revert it, but I note that the discussion under the NYT post contains a fair bit of vitriolic and confused commentary, which is less surprising when the target post itself works to conjure up e.g. emotionally charged parallels to the Manhattan project.
You'll be a better judge than I whether this thread would have devolved in a similar way, but personally I feel that the original article in this case also has significant poor qualities to be the chosen reporting on the event.