The chances seem slim that the Big Tech companies racing to smarten up their LLM chatbots will embrace this techno-veganism approach to AI. Competition is intense, and the rewards for producing the most powerful bots are astronomical. Hinton, who is not shy about expressing his political views, doubts that big public companies or startups backed by venture funds will hobble their AI innovations because of some feel-good view of public benefit.
On some days, Hinton says, he’s optimistic. “People are pretty ingenious, and it's not smarter than us yet, and they haven't evolved to be nasty and petty like people and very loyal to your tribe, and very unloyal to other tribes. And because of that, we may well be able to keep it under control and make it benevolent.” But other times, Hinton feels gloomy. “There are occasions when I believe that probably we're not going to be able to contain it, and we're just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.”
And then there’s a sudden jailbreak in Geoff Hinton’s unique and uncopyable analog neural net—science gets silenced, and politics, leavened by his very human sense of play, bursts out, “If we put Bernie in charge, and we had socialism, everything would be much better,” he says. I bet his former Google managers are relieved not to have to answer for that one.
www.sbs.com.au
