Why ‘godfather’ of AI Geoffrey Hinton quit Google to speak out about risks

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When Geoffrey Hinton had an ethical objection to his employer Google working with the US military in 2018, he didn’t join in public protests or put his name on the open complaint letter signed by more than 4,000 of his colleagues. Instead, he just spoke to Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder. “He said he was a bit upset about it too. And so they’re not pursuing it,” Hinton said in an interview at the time. The incident is symbolic of Hinton’s quiet influence in the artificial intelligence world. The 75-year-old professor is revered as one of the “godfathers” of AI because...