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Yasuhiro Kobayashi / The Yomiuri Shimbun Geoffrey Hinton speaks in Toronto.
By Yasuhiro Kobayashi / Yomiuri Shimbun Correspondent
21:00 JST, December 3, 2024
TORONTO — The inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will interfere with the safe development of artificial intelligence, Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton told The Yomiuri Shimbun in a recent interview.
Hinton, 76, is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and a leading AI scientist. He spoke to the Yomiuri ahead of the awards ceremony next Tuesday where he will receive the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.
AI developers need to spend 30 times more “compute resources” on safety research than they do now, Hinton said. He warned that the evolution of AI has been swamping the media with conspiracy theories and false information, causing “a disaster for democracy.”
Trump has announced his intention to repeal President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI safety, which requires developers to share critical information with the government, among other measures.
“I think Donald Trump has indicated a willingness to allow profit-driven companies to make whatever regulations they like, as long as they give him money,” Hinton said.
As a measure to ensure safety, Hinton stressed the need for legislation that would require each AI developer to spend about “30% … of the compute resources on safety research.” At present, he estimated they have spent about 1% on safety research, and Hinton would like it to be “a lot more than that.”
“An arms race” was how he described the intensifying competition over AI development, which involves such players as Google LLC, Microsoft Corp. and U.S. businessman Elon Musk, in addition to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“With a bunch of for-profit companies competing, safety is going to get left behind unless there’s very strong government regulation that forces the companies to do a lot of work on safety.”
The evolution of AI is expected to halve misdiagnoses in the medical field, help design better drugs and reduce accidents through autonomous driving. At the same time, Hinton predicted that AI was “going to get rid of a lot more jobs than it creates,” and as a result, “individuals get poorer because they lose their jobs.”
According to Hinton, he and many leading researchers believe there is at least a 50% chance that, “within 20 years, we’ll have things at least as smart as people, and probably smarter.”
“If we’re going to develop stuff that’s super intelligent, we have to be seriously worried about whether it’ll get rid of us,” he said.
As for China’s AI development, Hinton said, “It’s quite likely that China will take the lead from the U.S., maybe not for 20 years or so, but maybe sooner,” as it would put in more money.
Hinton, meanwhile, said Japan has “some very good researchers.”
“I think the development of robots for helping look after old people is an area where there’s an enormous market in Japan,” he said. “That’s one area where I would expect Japan to have an advantage.”
Geoffrey Hinton
Born in 1947, Hinton is known for his research into machine learning, a fundamental technology for generative AI. He is called the “godfather of AI.”
He announced in May 2023 that he was leaving Google, where he had worked for about a decade, to raise awareness of the dangers of AI. He was chosen in October as a winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics.
