What would smarter-than-human AI systems do? One unnerving possibility is that malicious individuals, groups or nation-states might simply co-opt them to further their own ends. “It’s a completely different form of intelligence,” he told the publication. Not only can AI systems learn things faster, he notes, but they can also share copies of their knowledge with each other almost instantly. That leads Hinton to the conclusion that AI systems might already be outsmarting us. That's not unlike the way a trained professional physicist can wrap her brain around new experimental findings much more quickly than a typical high school science student could. That's no longer the case, Hinton argues, noting that systems like GPT-4 can learn new things very quickly once properly trained by researchers. Researchers have long noted that artificial neural networks take much more time to absorb and apply new knowledge than people do since training them requires tremendous amounts of both energy and data. Maybe, he suggests, it has a 'much better learning algorithm” than we do, making it more efficient at cognitive tasks. While that would seem to put it at a major disadvantage relative to us, Hinton notes that GPT-4, the latest AI model from OpenAI, knows “hundreds of times more” than any single human.

The roughly 86 billion neurons packed into our skulls - and, more important, the 100 trillion connections those neurons forge among themselves - make that possible.īy contrast, the technology underlying ChatGPT features between 500 billion and a trillion connections, Hinton said in the interview. Our human brains can solve calculus equations, drive cars and keep track of the characters in “Succession” thanks to their native talent for organizing and storing information and reasoning out solutions to thorny problems. Here's a look at Hinton's biggest concerns about the future of AI.

Shortly after the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI released its latest AI model called GPT-4 in March, more than 1,000 researchers and technologists signed a letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development because, they said, it poses “profound risks to society and humanity.”

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