Toronto's pioneer of artificial intelligence quits Google to openly discuss dangers of AI

A Toronto professor considered to be a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence announced his departure from Google on Monday so that he could openly discuss the “dangers of AI.”

A Toronto professor considered to be a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence announced his departure from Google on Monday so that he could openly discuss the “dangers of AI.”

Geoffrey Hinton, professor at the University of Toronto and the “godfather” of deep learning – a field of artificial intelligence that mimics the human brain – announced his departure from the company on Monday citing the desire to freely discuss the implications of deep learning and artificial intelligence, and the possible consequences if it were utilized by "bad actors."

Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist, is best-known for a series of deep neural network breakthroughs that won him, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio the 2018 Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computing. 

“I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google," Hinton said on Twitter, adding that "Google has acted very responsibly" in its implementation of the technology.

Google confirmed the 75-year-old’s departure to CTV News Toronto on Monday, saying the now-former employee has “retired” from his role.

“Geoff has made foundational breakthroughs in AI, and we appreciate his decade of contributions at Google," Google’s Chief Scientist Jeff Dean said in a statement on Monday.

Hinton's departure comes at a time when a number of notable industry leaders have shown signs of wariness towards the technology. In March, Elon Musk co-signed a letter with nearly three thousand others demanding a pause on AI research for at least six months, in order to develop safety protocols. Aside from being the Chief Executive Officer of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX, Musk co-founded OpenAI, the research lab that created ChatGPT and GPT-4.