Geoffrey Hinton says he pushed the neural-network approach to AI for about 50 years while few people believed in it.
“I pushed that approach for like 50 years because so few people believed in it.”
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Geoffrey Hinton
1 episodes · 23 quoted claims
Geoffrey Hinton says John von Neumann and Alan Turing both believed in brain-modelled AI, and that AI's history would have differed had either lived longer.
“Early on, von Neumann believed it and Turing believed it. And if either of those had lived, I think AI would have had a very different history.”
Geoffrey Hinton says cyberattacks rose about twelvefold between 2023 and 2024, which he attributes probably to large language models making phishing easier.
“between 2023 and 2024, they increased by about a factor of twelve, 1,200%. And that's probably because these large language models make it much easier to do phishing attacks.”
Geoffrey Hinton says European AI regulations contain a clause stating they do not apply to military uses of AI.
“the European regulations have a a clause in them that say none of these regulations apply to military uses of AI.”
Geoffrey Hinton says he split his and his children's money across three Canadian banks to hedge against a cyberattack taking down one bank.
“So I spread my money, my children's money, between three banks, in the belief that if a cyber attack takes down one Canadian bank, the other Canadian banks will very quickly get very careful.”
Geoffrey Hinton says a friend in Sussex had a drone costing under 200 pounds that could follow him through woods.
“I was visiting a friend of mine in Sussex who had a drone that cost less than 200 pounds, and the drone went up.”
Geoffrey Hinton says the object-recognition network was named AlexNet and the company he, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krizhevsky founded was DNNresearch.
“the network that recognized objects was called Alex Net. The company was called D N N Research, Deep Neural Network Research.”
Geoffrey Hinton says he joined Google at age 65 after the company acquired his technology.
“I went at age sixty five to work at Google.”
Geoffrey Hinton says he taught a Coursera course hoping to earn money, but it earned little, which led him to sell his work to a big company.
“I taught a Coursera course in the hope that I'd make lots of money that way, but there was no money in that.”
Geoffrey Hinton describes distillation, which he worked on at Google, as transferring the knowledge of a large neural network into a small one.
“distillation is a way of taking what a big model knows, a big neural net knows, and getting that knowledge into a small neural net.”
Geoffrey Hinton says his closest moment to a revelation about AI's ability was when Google's PaLM system explained why a joke was funny.
“The closest I had to a eureka moment was when a Google system called Palm was able to say why a joke was funny”
Geoffrey Hinton says he timed his departure from Google so he could speak freely about AI safety at an MIT conference organised by MIT Technology Review.
“The precise timing of when I left Google was so that I could talk freely at a conference at M I T”
Geoffrey Hinton says Google held back its large chatbots, possibly to protect its reputation, whereas OpenAI had less to lose by releasing theirs.
“When they had these big chat bots, they didn't release them, possibly because they were worried about their reputation.”
Geoffrey Hinton says his former student Ilya Sutskever was probably the most important person behind early versions of ChatGPT such as GPT-2.
“He was probably the most important person behind the development of, um, ChatGPT, the the early versions like GPT two, he was very important in the development of that.”
Geoffrey Hinton says he believes OpenAI promised a significant share of its compute to safety research and later reduced that share.
“It would use a significant fraction of its resources of the compute time for doing safety research, and then it kept, then it reduced that fraction.”
Geoffrey Hinton credits Elon Musk with giving Ukrainians communication, via Starlink, during the war with Russia.
“giving the Ukrainians communication during the war with Russia.”
Geoffrey Hinton cites automatic teller machines as a past technology that did not cause bank teller joblessness, but argues AI is different.
“When automatic teller machines came in, a lot of bank tellers didn't lose their jobs, they just got to do more interesting things.”
Geoffrey Hinton says his niece's complaint-letter work fell from 25 minutes to about five with a chatbot, meaning five times fewer people are needed.
“My niece answers letters of complaint to a health service. It used to take her 25 minutes.”
Geoffrey Hinton guesses that superintelligence will arrive within ten to twenty years, though he says it could be sooner or around fifty years away.
“My guess is between ten and twenty years we'll have superintelligence.”
Geoffrey Hinton says digital neural networks can share information by averaging their weights at trillions of bits per second, billions of times faster than human communication.
“These things are transferring trillions of bits a second, so they're billions of times better than us at sharing information.”
Geoffrey Hinton says he asked GPT-4, without web access, why a compost heap is like an atom bomb, to test whether it could see analogies.
“at the point when G P T four couldn't look on the web, I asked it, Why is a compost heap like an atom bomb?”
Geoffrey Hinton recalls a video of the US education secretary referring to AI in classrooms as 'A1'.
“I've seen the video of the US. education secretary talking about how they're gonna get AI in the classrooms, except she thought it was called A1.”
Geoffrey Hinton says his cousin Joan Hinton was one of two female physicists at Los Alamos and moved to China after the atomic bomb was dropped.
“she was one of the two female physicists at Los Alamos. And then after they dropped the bomb, she moved to China.”